Camille Claudel, 1915 (2013)
Directed by Bruno Dumont

Film Review

The Portrait of the Artist as an Abandoned Wretch, so might be labelled Bruno Dumont's latest film Camille Claudel, 1915, released to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the death of France's most celebrated female sculptor.  The turbulent life of Claudel has already been effectively dramatised, in Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1988).  This earlier film, a typically overblown 1980s period drama, brought Isabelle Adjani international acclaim for her tortured portrayal of the tragic artist who allowed herself to be destroyed by her infatuation for her mentor Auguste Rodin.  Dumont's film picks up more or less from where Nuytten's left off, with Claudel languishing in the asylum from which she will never be released.

In stark contrast to Nuytten's florid blockbuster epic, Bruno Dumont's film is a much more intimate and low-key work which concerns itself with just one incident in Claudel's life - a fateful meeting with her brother Paul that would decide whether she would be set free to enjoy a happy reconciliation with her family or else forced to spend the rest of her days in obscurity, forgotten and immured at Montdevergues, an asylum near Avignon in south-eastern France.  The events depicted in the film take place over a period of three days in 1915, three days that would condemn Camille Claudel to a 30-year-long calvary.  It was not until 1943 that Claudel was finally released from her Hell on Earth, starved to death as one of the less visible victims of France's Nazi-friendly Vichy government.

Going by his work to date, Bruno Dumont appears to have as much of an aversion for stars as he does for commercial cinema in general.  In common with Robert Bresson, the French filmmaker with whom he is most readily compared, Dumont has no need of big name actors and prefers the malleability and raw authenticity afforded by non-professional or inexperienced actors.  This was before Bruno met Juliette...  One of France's most high-profile and well-paid actresses, Juliette Binoche is probably the last person you would expect to see in a Bruno Dumont film.  Yet Binoche is no stranger to auteur cinema - let us not forget that she cut her acting teeth working with Jean-Luc Godard (Je vous salue, Marie), Leos Carax (Mauvais sang and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Trois couleurs: Bleu), and subsequently did some fine work for André Téchiné, Michael Haneke and Olivier Assayas.  So keen was she to work with Dumont that Binoche rang him up one day and left a message on his answer phone (well if you don't ask...); she was rewarded with one of the most challenging roles of her career.  It is not clear why Dumont took Binoche up on her offer, but it may have had something to do with the fact that she was exactly the same age that Camille Claudel was when she was first committed to an asylum in 1913...

Authenticity is the central pillar of Bruno Dumont's cinema, and this is what led him to shoot the film in an actual psychiatric hospital, employing real patients and medical staff in place of professional actors.  It is this relentless striving to get to the truth of things that allows Dumont to evoke, with a shocking face-pummelling brutality, the numbing despair and hopelessness that Camille Claudel must have felt as she lived out her last years on Earth.  Having an actress of Binoche's calibre on board wasn't so much the icing on the cake as a Heaven-sent gift.  Dumont absolutely exploits her talents to the full and she responds by giving what is assuredly the finest performance of her career.  For the first half of the film, the camera barely strays from Binoche's unmade-up face, and what it reveals is something that is at once unsettling and hypnotic, the exposed soul of a woman who, denied the freedom she desperately needs to flourish as an artist and the affection that all human beings naturally crave, gradually loses her mind and her will to live, in the most inhumane of settings.  Binoche holds nothing back and the film has as much to say about her as it does about the character that she surrenders herself to with such blithe devotion.

As is his custom, Dumont makes no attempt to humanise his characters.  The mentally disabled people that surround his heroine are shown to us exactly as they would appear to her - unfortunate grotesques that inspire not sympathy, but fear and disgust.  In this demonic congregation, Camille sees what she will become if she is forced to stay in the asylum - an abandoned wretch stripped of all human dignity.  The film brings home the extent to which mental illness is still regarded, as one of the great taboos of our time, and if we are shocked by what Dumont shows us in his nightmarish bedlam, that is probably because we deserve to be shocked.  To lose one's mind is surely the worst thing that can happen to us, a far worse fate than death.  And yet, through the experiences of Camille Claudel, Dumont forces us to see the injustice and inhumanity of our prejudices.  A society that bears tolerance and compassion for mental illness is clearly preferable to one that treats those suffering from schizophrenia and similar disorders as dangerous criminals.

Taking as its source letters between Camille and her brother and documents at the asylum where she was incarcerated, the film dares to question whether Camille Claudel was justly admitted to the asylum in the first place.  Her brother Paul, himself a distinguished artist (a poet and playwright) as well as a prominent diplomat, is presented to us in a way that leaves us wondering whether he is a greater threat to society than his unfortunate sister.  A flowery romantic who sees the hand of God in everything, Paul Claudel appears to have an even more warped view of reality than his sister.  To his naive way of thinking, the First World War can only be taken as a sign of God's displeasure with mankind, but he represents the prevailing bourgeois mentality of the time and must therefore be right.  He is not the best person to sit in judgement on someone who so fiercely rejects the conventions of bourgeois respectability as Camille Claudel. 

Once the two main players in the drama have been introduced to us, the film's last act has a mechanical predictability to it, and we can only weep at the ease with which human beings can fail to be guided by compassion and understanding.  Had her brother allowed just a sliver of kindness to intrude into his heart, Mademoiselle Claudel may have overcome her persecution complex and been fit enough to resume her artistic career.  But it was not to be.  Mad dogs are mad dogs and they are best locked away where no one can see them.  Despite the austere beauty of its mise-en-scène and the compelling performances,  Camille Claudel, 1915 is not a comfortable film to watch, even for those already acquainted with Dumont's cinema.  Yet, long and hard as the journey is, it takes us to somewhere meaningful, and by the end of it you can hardly fail to be impressed by the economy and expressive power of this, the finest accomplishment so far from the most committed of French auteur filmmakers, aided and abetted by an actress at the height of her powers.

Film Synopsis

Winter 1915.  The renowned sculptor Camille Claudel finds herself incarcerated in an asylum in the south of France.  Her family have given up on her and it seems that after a turbulent life she will be forced to live out the rest of her days as a pitiful recluse.  Patiently, she awaits a visit from her brother, Paul Claudel...