Critics reviews

“Rodin” is no plain biopic, and it certainly doesn’t require knowledge of his work to get hooked on the film. It’s in fact best when it does away with historical details and feels like a film about an artist and their art form, who just happened to exist.

Biopics often suggest Wikipedia pages, offering encapsulations of their subjects’ greatest highs and lows in a reassuringly coherent manner. . . . In this regard, Jacques Doillon’s Rodin is a bracing surprise, relating the life of iconic French sculptor Auguste Rodin (Vincent Lindon) in a series of vignettes that suggestively stand on their own while proffering a cumulative sense of Rodin as a man and artist.

Critics at last year’s Cannes Film Festival received “Rodin” as if they had collectively taken a marble anvil to the head. If the movie plays marginally better now, it still lacks an arresting perspective on its subject. Employing an episodic, borderline shapeless structure, it subscribes to the kind of screenwriting shorthand that prompts bad guffaws.

Handsomely filmed, sluggishly paced, and not very different from any Great Man tribute that conflates libido with creative inspiration, Rodin may be less illuminating than a scroll through Wikipedia.

Let’s give it this much: Jacques Doillon’s tough-sit sex-life-of-the-artist boob-a-palooza looks great... Other than the sets and facsimiles of sculptures, Higelin is the most engaging thing in Rodin, its heat and its heart.

The work bristles with vital physicality. . . . Most movies about artists tiptoe reverentially around the art and focus instead on the tortured life. Rodin is very much about the work: Not since Jacques Rivette's magnificent La Belle Noiseuse (1991) has a film zeroed in on creative process with the same obsessive care it devotes to the artist's volatile love life.

For me, the staid timidity of Rodin, at odds with the rest of Doillon's œuvre, elicited sadness more than opprobrium, sadness, that is, that one of France's great directors has been reduced to turning out commissioned pieces that garner financing for eminently non-cinematic reasons (2017 is the centenary of Rodin's death, it turns out), rather than being given the opportunity to develop his own idiosyncratic œuvre.

Jacques Doillon's suffocatingly dull and didactic artist biopic "Rodin" must surely rank near the bottom of the list for everyone who saw it. Slow, taxing films are par for the course at a major international film festival, but this inexplicable competition entry is the rare experience to which watching clay dry would be infinitely preferable.

It’s been almost 100 years since Rodin’s death, and this biopic doesn’t do the man justice. A visit to the Musée Rodin would be a better option to learn more about the life he lived.

[W]hat lies at the heart of the film [is] the shock of an embrace, giddiness, passion, agony and death, and the eternal Promethean attempt at embodying the heavenly powers on Earth and the forces of nature in humankind.

[A] turgid embarrassment of a biopic that even the most devoted fans of the late sculptor might find themselves fidgeting through.

‘Rodin’ is elegantly shot (by Christophe Beaucarne) and designed, but it is also plodding and unilluminating.