Educational Media Reviews Online

he first image of this languidly-paced film is of the back of Juliette Binoche who plays the sculptress Camille Claudel, confined at 51 to Montdevergues, a mental institution in the South of France. Two nuns/nurses are telling her that she’s dirty and must be bathed, and they bring her into a bath, and when we first see her, Binoche’s expression is as revealing as her naked body is. In nearly every shot of this harrowingly authentic film about mental incarceration, the mesmerizing and beautifully unmade-up Binoche delivers an astonishingly haunting and commanding performance. It’s the reason to see the movie.

Based on the correspondence between Paul and Camille Claudel and on her medical records, the back-story is provided in the opening credits. Camille’s younger brother is the writer/mystic Paul Claudel, and she was August Rodin’s student and then his mistress for fifteen years. She leaves him in 1905, living and sculpting reclusively in her Paris studio, and in 1915, she is confined to the asylum by her family. She will never sculpt again. Filmed at an actual psychiatric institution with real-life mental patients and nurses, Binoche’s Claudel, given to paranoia and fits of despair and crying, is forced to, in several scenes, interact with severely disabled women. It’s clear that she doesn’t belong in this place, and her doctor agrees with her. She writes letters to her sister, but she doesn’t hear back. When her brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent) the only family member who sees her, comes to visit, she begs him to release her, and though he professes a deep spiritual love of God, he has no connection to her pain, no empathy, respect, or love for her or her artistic genius. She tells him she blames Rodin’s envy of her talent for ruining her life, but Paul doesn’t believe her. In the last frame of the film, she seems complacent about her fate. Binoche looks into the camera for the first time submissively. Claudel will die in bondage at the age of 79, and she will be buried in a communal grave, her body never found.

There are beautiful outdoor shots of mountains, hills, rocks, and trees—the South of France doesn’t have to try too hard to look pretty. And Binoche has a few moments of joy when she’s outside in nature, able to breathe in fresh air and natural light. But her profound anguish and her misery fill up most of the film. Not much happens, although, Binoche’s extraordinary performance mitigates the lack of incident. Seeing Claudel flourishing as an artist would have provided a transcendent balance to the grim story Dumont chooses to tell, as well as the chance to have seen the glory of a genius before her wings were clipped.