Kritiken

Whereas Nuytten's film was a floridly melodramatic (if watchable) showcase for Isabelle Adjani at her most passionate, this later history of Claudel, which stars Juliette Binoche, is spare, harsh and minimalistic, as one would expect from Bruno Dumont.

Dumont's commitment to tone and aesthetics is remorseless — this was an injustice, and you will suffer accordingly for 94 minutes. But it's not just suffering for suffering's sake. In our present Huxleyan existence of digital devices, it's just as easy to block out or avoid such a gruelling experience entirely, but it's worth looking into the abyss that was one woman's life.

Even if Claudel is truly paranoid and schizophrenic, Dumont keeps her humanity close and casts her as one of the most reasonable and caring characters in the film. The film continually asks what is true madness?, offering few answers; rather, Dumont forces the audience to grapple with the question instead of providing his own answers.

Claudel is a well-manicured curio designed to showcase not only Binoche's star turn, but also a not especially illuminating position-paper in French intellectual history... Camille Claudel 1915 "complicates" its title character by recourse to one of the hoariest clichés of the humanist art cinema: the idea that the simpleminded are purer of heart than the worldly and, in this Catholic context, perhaps closer to God as well.

During this final act, there's a tidy master shot of Paul alongside a Catholic peer... The iconic quality of the image is contrasted by the loud buzzing of a fly just offscreen. This is the kind of beguiling tension that is largely missing from Camille Claudel 1915. With its rigid, organized framing and cool denial of anything one might call pleasure, Dumont's filmmaking starts to feel like a product of the same strict society his film purports to reject.

[Binoche] gives a monumental performance here, not least because it's so contained. The moments of protest and anguish are all the more moving and painful because the Camille we mostly see is an observer, with impassive, barely changing features—gazing calmly ahead, or turning to the camera with an implacable, borderline-haughty look... Camille Claudel 1915 is a film of stark, sober rewards, and possibly Dumont's finest.

Juliette Binoche, as Claudel, is occasionally touching, but as soon as interest flares, the movie suffocates it via endless takes of her suffering through daily chores. The result is neither austere nor contemplative, just punishing and inert, an excruciating slog whose entire length can't show as much injustice as director Mark Robson and producer Val Lewton did in one shot of their 1946 movie on the same theme, "Bedlam.

Watching Binoche's every flicker of confusion, anger, remorse, and hope, we are made privy to a succession of emotions that transcend time and place. This is more a film about acting—both the historical necessity of women to constantly play roles for audiences real and perceived, and about our experience of watching a major contemporary screen actor inhabit a character forced to play those roles—than about linear historical events.

Typically, Dumont's movies build to impulsive acts—crimes, moments of forgiveness—that are steeped in mystery and symbolism; his worldview is a kind of secular mysticism where the paradoxical stands in for the divine. Camille Claudel, however, is a story of clear-cut wrongdoing and oppression, complicated only by its protagonist's mental illness. As Paul Claudel, Jean-Luc Vincent projects robotic self-righteousness, as though his religious convictions had completely replaced his feelings.

In this raw, sparse setting, with its windswept landscape populated by patients whose grimacing faces share the same depth as Claudel's best portrait busts, Binoche is superb. Quiet and calculating one minute, unhinged and sobbing the next, she expresses brilliantly the maddening frustration of a falsely incarcerated genius.

Binoche bulldozes through the melee in character, but of course the texture of the film falls between horrific realism and freak-show exploitation, a tension that can either double-down on the naturalistic impact of Claudel's plight or make you speculate queasily about life on the set between takes. Or both. In all cases, it's far more radical than Bruno Nuytten's celebrated 1988 version, and one of the year's thorniest releases.

Binoche imbues Camille with a hardened defiance, but that only suggests Camille's anti-patriarchal form, it never truly exhibits it, and it seals the film off from its intended critiques. This makes for an exercise in hollow miserablism, aesthetically and structurally embodying that which it seeks to critique.