dromasca The year is 2017, Camille Claudel is back in town and she seems to go through a revival and reevaluation of her work and short artistic career. A museum dedicated to her life and art opened in March in the small French town of Nogent-sur-Seine, and the museum includes many of the works that survived the agitated 20th century and the destruction by the artist's own hands. Books are being written about her, and art history starts to take her seriously into account. Before this however, there were the films, and especially this one Camille Claudel from 1988. It is not exaggerated to say, I believe, that the film prepared her comeback to the world of arts.Camille Claudel deals more with the character of Camille Claudel, her love story with Auguste Rodin, her relationship with her brother Paul, one of the important French poets of the first half of the 20th century than with her art. Actually one of the few critical observations one may have about the visual part of the film is that there is so little art in it, and from the film we cannot make to ourselves an idea about how good she was. We see an artist fighting with her material, we see a woman fighting prejudice in a world and at a time when women were far from being recognized as equal professionally to men, even less in arts. We see the young woman and artist falling under the fascination of her master and being torn between love and admiration for him, and the need to express herself, to be herself. We see her falling down the spiral of vanity and then madness, and it's up to us to judge whether the roots of her fall are in the social environment, in the attitude of her lover who may be a great artist but is also a womanizer and small human being in terms of relations, or in her own vanity and narcissism. Add to this the ambiguity of the relationship to her brother, and we can now understand the willingly or not, the focus of the script and director Bruno Nuytten was on her personal path rather than on her art.For Bruno Nuytten this was the first film as director, but he already had in 1988 a long career as cinematographer, including a few superb films by Claude Berri. Not everything works or better said, not everything stood the almost 30 years since the film was made. Isabelle Adjani is superb, beautiful and ambitious, a fighter but fragile at the same time, turn between love and vanity. This is one of her best roles. Gérard Depardieu is very fit to Rodin's role, at that time his physical qualities were also perfect and added to his huge talent. The cinematography of the film (signed by Pierre Lhomme ) is excellent, and there are many scenes to remember - in the studio where Rodin and Claudel are shown fighting with the material from which they extracted their works, and out in the nature with clear allusions to the period of the Impressionists when this film is set. On the other hand the soundtrack is horrible. The use of violin music which would have been exaggerated even for a melodrama made in 1938, it's simply a disaster for this film about art and artists made in 1988. Add to this the poor quality of the sound (at least in the copy screened by ARTE TV) which makes half of the dialog incomprehensible even when it is not covered by violins. Maybe digital sound re-working will sometimes in the future save this film. It is highly deserved.

Sindre Kaspersen Former cinematographer Bruno Nuytten's directorial debut from 1988 which gained two Academy Award nominations in 1989, is based on the novel "Camille Claudel" by Reine-Marie Paris, grand-daughter of Camille Claudel's brother Paul Claudel, which was adapted by Bruno Nuytten and Marylin Goldin. Isabelle Adjani won the Silver Berlin Bear at the 39th Berlin Film Festival in 1989 for her role in this film which tells the story about French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) and her relationship with impressionist sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) who became her teacher and lover during the early 19th century in Paris, France before the First World War.With warm, colorful visuals, atmospheric music and detailed milieu depictions, this precisely filmed character-driven drama finely captures the era it portrays and the development of an historic figure who became a true artist. Isabelle Adjani's interpretation of an ardent and self-disciplined young woman raised in a middle-class family who struggled with her art and with her love is remarkable, and so is Gérard Depardieu's performance as the love of her life Auguste Rodin. Their acting is solely reason enough to see this interesting and well told biographical period piece which centres on an unusually crafted love-story between two great artists.

Myshkin_Karamazov While and after seeing Camille Claudel, one wonders if one should celebrate the artist that could have been, or rather mourn the moronic hypocrites populating her world. A world whose Marquesean death was foretold.Almost everyone played by the supporting cast displayed (or tried to hide) how acutely and incurably they were suffering with diseases, physical and mental. With the sole and occasional exception of her father, everyone else treated the artist in a less than human manner. Despot mother, Hypocrite brother, Deceitful love! What real treasures had this Genius woman of her times to cope with! To top it all she happened to be living in such a dysfunctional society which years later, a great filmmaker and artist of the same nation, Jean Renoir, was to label as "corrupt to the core". Amen to Renoir. This film like most any other film depicting the real dilemma of a society, makes one pay an additional salute to his Le Regle Du Ju.

snoozer1 What is it about French *EPICS* that makes them so dreary? 'Camille Claudel' suffers from the same intrinsic problems as its predecessors ('Entre Nous' comes to mind). Too much style ... not enough substance. Make no mistake folks ... this is a very lavish (read expensive) production. Perhaps that is the problem. Too much time and money spent on production design and cinematography and not enough time on script development. This is supposed to be a character driven piece yet somehow the 'story' just gets lost in all that grandeur. It's only during the last 3rd of the film do we we actually get to see any sort of 'performance' from Isabelle Adjani. For the rest, both her and Depardieu are minnows lost at sea in a maze of bloated film sets awash with moody lighting.Yes .. the cinematography IS breathtaking so kudos to Pierre Lhomme. I beg to differ with other reviewers about the musical score tho. It's one of the worst i have endured in recent times. More often than not it seems to be totally out of place (and out of context) to the scene we are witnessing ... almost as if it had been scored without actually *seeing* the film.I cant help but feel how this story would have been handled by a director with some understanding of the nature of art, but more importantly ... the ARTIST. Those having seen Jacques Rivette's 'La Belle Noiseuse' will understand. And for those interested in Depardieu driven historical pieces, seek out (the hard to find) Le Colonel Chabert. He's performance in that film is exquisite.This is an overly melodramatic film and a sad waste of money. They could have made 3 films for what this one must have cost. Not recommended.