Director: Bruno Dumont
Year Released: 2013
Rating: 3.0
Camille Claudel (Juliette Binoche), a gifted sculptor (and former lover of Auguste Rodin), finds herself committed to a mental facility by her own family and eager to leave - she's waiting for her brother, the poet Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent) to arrive and hopefully take her away from there. Dumont omits Camille's life as an artist to show her living in conditions that make her unable to create art and pleading with God for some kind of salvation - tragically, she would end up trapped in the institution the rest of her life. One of Dumont's major themes deals with human kind's relationship to The Divine, and here Binoche's character, a major artist, finds herself in a Living Hell, made more agonizing by her own delusions (she fears being poisoned) and surrounded by individuals most likely worse off than her whose presence makes her condition worse (Dumont cast actually mentally ill/retarded people as one might figure). It's hard to find a movie dwelling on a woman in torment to be a satisfying experience, but Binoche commits to the role completely, and Dumont's disdain for not only her hypocritical brother but the hospital's chief physician is very clear.
