Rodin (2017)
Directed by Jacques Doillon

Film Review

The biopic is a notoriously fraught genre, as many eminently respectable filmmakers from Mervyn LeRoy to Oliver Stone have demonstrated with their well-meaning but mostly ill-conceived attempts to cast light on some famous personage of the past.  Jacques Doillon is the latest director of substance to throw away his credibility in yet another misguided attempt to celebrate the life and work of a great artist by spectacularly failing to comprehend what the task entails.  Doillon was originally approached by two producers to make a documentary marking the 2017 centenary of the death of the revered French sculptor Auguste Rodin, but he instead opted for a dramatic approach, having admitted that he had had no particular prior interest in the subject.  It's hardly surprising then that Rodin is the director's weakest film to date, a formless slab of unengaging dross that functions neither as art nor as entertainment, positively revelling in its gawky didacticism and coldly mechanical lubricious excesses.

At least Doillon managed to get one thing right, namely the casting of Vincent Lindon for the lead role.  The winner of the Best Actor Award at Cannes in 2015 for his role in Stéphane Brizé's La loi du marché, Vindon has gained recognition in recent years as one of the acting giants of French cinema.  There's no doubt that he has the intensity, charisma and sheer weight of personality that the part of Auguste Rodin demands, and having spent many months training as a sculptor, he is nothing less than convincing as the great man in every scene in which he is at work, fashioning some of the most sublime masterpieces of French art with an almost religious degree of absorption.  These are the scenes that allow the film to seize a few precious shards of respectability, as they really do convey a sense of the artist at work, ripping pieces from his soul for the exigencies of his art, comparable to what we find in Maurice Pialat's (vastly superior) Van Gogh (1991) and Jacques Rivette's La Belle noiseuse ( 1991).

Where the film falls down massively is when it attempts to shift from Rodin the artist to Rodin the man, resorting to facile slices of his life that are, frankly, about as credible as the most egregiously hammed-up instalment of your least favourite soap opera.  To say that Doillon's writing is below par is putting it mildly.  The dedicated auteur whose previous work includes such authentic and arresting portrayals of human experience as Un sac de billes (1975), La Fille de 15 ans (1989) and Ponette (1996) is, uncharacteristically, content to fall back on limp clichés and sloppy wordsmithery of the most toe-curling kind.  It's hard to stomach the presence of Rodin's artistic contemporaries when they show up momentarily merely to provide the thinnest veneer of historical context, but what is most aggravating is how Doillon chooses to portray the sculptor's mistress Camille Claudel, not as a gifted artist destroyed by an all-consuming torrent of passion and ambition, but as a mere object of pathetic derision.

If the film has one fatal flaw it is the casting of Izïa Higelin as Claudel.  The actress who impressed as the co-star of Catherine Corsini's lesbian-themed drama La Belle saison (2015) is totally miscast as the woman who was by all accounts Rodin's near-equal, in ability if not achievement.  Doillon imagines Claudel to be some kind of weak-willed girly innocent rather than a driven artist who is ultimately eaten up by untameable passions.  Comparison of Doillon's film with earlier screen portrayal of Claudel - Isabelle Adjani in Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1988) and Juliette Binoche in Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel, 1915 (2013) - merely reinforce the impression of how far wide of the mark it is.  By contrast, Séverine Caneele brings an almost painful degree of credibility to her interpretation of Rodin's common-law wife, Rose Beuret.  Caneele, a former textile worker, was the unlikely recipient of the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1999 for her first screen role in Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité.  She has been away from our screens for 13 years, last seen in a supporting role in Bertrand Tavernier's Holy Lola (2004), but her return in Doillon's film reminds us what a superlative actress she is, and how badly her talents are needed.

Alternating masterfully composed sequences of the artist labouring in his studio with tedious domestic interludes and gratuitous full-on romps with naked models all too willing to service their employer's libidinous needs, the film rapidly loses any kind of coherence and becomes a muddled potpourri of art film and overly didactic educational document, more silly over-blown hagiography than serious biography.  Given Doillon's standing as one of the immense auteurs of the post-Nouvelle Vague generation and the fascination that Auguste Rodin continues to exert it seems scarcely credible that the film is as dull, ponderous and off-putting as it is.  Some highly sensual photography and an extraordinary attention to detail (the fact that many scenes were filmed within the house in which Rodin lived and worked adds a frisson of verisimilitude to the piece) are a paltry compensation for Doillon's atrocious writing and his all too obvious lack of honest engagement with the subject.  Ultimately, you are left feeling that you have wasted two hours of your life - two hours that might better have been spent visiting the Museé Rodin in Paris, a far more satisfying way to appreciate the work of a colossus of French art.

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1880.  The celebrated sculptor Auguste Rodin is 40 and has just received his first state commission.  This will be the Gates of Hell, one of Rodin's finest achievements which includes two figurines that will evoke his two most famous works - the Kiss and the Thinker.  He has been in a happy relationship with his long-term companion Rose when he falls in love with one of his most talented students, Camille Claudel.  Rodin and Claudel share ten years of creative and emotional passion, but the affair was bound to end like a raging fire that suddenly burns itself out.  Afterwards, Rodin resumes his solo career, more daring and iconoclastic than ever.  His sculpture of the famous author Honoré de Balzac is so innovative that it provokes a storm of controversy, but it marks a decisive moment in the foundation of modern art.  By the age of sixty, Rodin is the most revered sculptor since Michelangelo...