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Camille Claudel More at IMDbPro »

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31 reviews in total

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12 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Adjani was robbed of her Oscar!, 25 December 2002

Author: Banquo13 (bpothik@aol.com) from United States

Isabelle Adjani is stunning as the title character in this rich and passionate film. I am amazed anytime an actor or actresses changes physically in the part of a film (and without tons of make-up and special effects, either!)and Adjani does this remarkably well! We as an audience are just as stunned as Eugene Blot when he finds Camille drunk and spiraling into the depths of madness. Her appearance is nothing less than shocking.

The film as a whole is engaging with a whirlwind of emotions--rage, sadness, torment, bliss; by the time the nearly 3 hours are up, I am exhausted. Adjani and Depardieu are part of that emotional energy as they passionately go at it--sex, sculpture and anger; especially when it comes to the latter. It is almost worth it to stop reading the subtitles and listen to them rage and lash out at one another.

Adjani is powerful in so much of this film...I am amazed she didn't receive that best actress Oscar she was up for. Her torment and pain is riveting--especially in French. I am glad they did not decide to dub this film into English; hearing Adjani sob and ask "Pourquoi? Pourquoi?" would be empty with her mouthing the words "Why? why?" in English.

The film as a whole is a bit long, but overall is stunning. The sad epilogue is even sadder if you know that Claudel's remains were interred in a mass grave after her brother Paul failed to claim them from her original grave [the asylums only interred bodies in individual plots for a certain amount of time; space was at a premium.] So, the brilliant Camille Claudel's remains ended up in an unmarked grave mixed in with others who went unclaimed, as well.

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9 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
one of the most brilliant acting in a movie, 13 July 1999

Author: anonymous from Paris, France

How the american academy award could have forgotten one of the best performance of an actress ? it's a total mystery! The talent of Isabelle ADJANI is not at all recognized as it deserves. She's absolutely poignant in this part, from the young Camille to the crackin'up mature sculptor falling in despair and madness. The scene where Rodin touch her art in the dark and leads him to a scene where their respective egos fight each other, discovering the deep scars let by their devastating passion is an highlight of acting. At his level, it can be compared to "sunset boulevard" or "a streetcar named Desire".

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7 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Isabelle Adjani is impressive, 13 December 2004

Author: hspm from Germany

This is one of the films I actually would give more than 10 points ! Judging from other comments, it seems that people either love this film very much, or they hate it. I was particularly impressed by Isabelle Adjani's performance as an artist and lover of Rodin who changed between devotion and obsession. Until I saw that film I had the impression that her (IA's) most important task in films was to look good. Admittedly, I did not know that many films with her in it. And she was, and is, pretty good at fulfilling that task. Her multi-faceted role as Camille Claudel was truly spectacular, considerably better than that of her colleague Gérard Depardieu who, nevertheless, was quite impressive as Rodin.

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9 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Darkness and Light, 25 February 2000

Author: Tim O'Grady (t_o_grady@hotmail.com) from Madison, Wisconsin

This film is about the tragic failure of a genius. She fails not so much because of her tendency to make fatal mistakes but because of the shape those mistakes took in her mind. This, even as lesser personages prospered (e.g., Camille's brother Paul, the famous Catholic poet and diplomat) because they were not adverse to espousing convenient "beliefs" for the sake of earthly success. Many viewers will feel a strong affinity with Camille, not because they consider themselves geniuses but rather for the interior world she constructed that, without religion, gave the exterior world meaning. I say she was without religion, but in fact sculpture was her religion--at least until her final failure to gain the respect and patronage of capricious buyers. It was then that her religion (her meaningful myth) took the form of a conspiracy delusion. Powerful people, she thought (mostly, the sculptor Rodin, who had been her lover), were out to get her, thwarting her every move.

What we experience here is a thoughtful, scary exploration of the darkness that is a paradoxical part of all brilliance.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Wonderful! A must see for those who appreciate quality films., 14 July 2002
Author: Ronni (poemlady@aol.com) from Long Island, New York

I couldn't take my eyes away from the television, and it wasn't because it was in French with English subtitles. This is a superbly acted film depicting two artists' work, passion, fears and ultimately her downfall, falling victim to her own creative mind.

Now that this wonderful story will be a Broadway musical in 2003 under the finesse of Frank Wildhorn and the magical voice of lovely Linda Eder, one will certainly appreciate familiarizing themselves with the background of the subject of this movie, Camille Claudel.

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Extremely underrated. Adjani's performance is epic!, 22 January 2008

Author: saucyjack1968 from United States

This film is beyond beautiful and beyond heartbreaking. After 19 years, it still tears the heart right out of me. I first saw "Camille Claudel" while it was on it's Oscar campaign in 1990 for "Best Foreign Film" and "Best Actress - Isabelle Adjani". I hadn't really begun to appreciate foreign film yet so I had no idea what to expect. What I saw was an angel beyond description giving one of the greatest acting performances I had EVER seen, still to this day. This film is heart-wrenching in it's beauty and romantic tragedy. In fact it makes art of it. I went back to the theater to watch it six times, I even dragged friends along. Yes the film was brilliant, but what I went back to see was perhaps the most beautiful woman I've ever seen on the big screen. Isabelle Adjani's beauty in this film is breath-taking and her performance is one of the most intense and deeply moving in history. I have this film on VHS and DVD. I still love to watch it.

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5 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Watch at your own peril!, 21 October 1999

Author: Neel V Kumar from Silicon Valley, CA, USA

A *very* powerful film about a woman and her life. Acting and setup is so good that it can leave permanent scars on your psyche. Hitchcock can scare for a few minutes, while this movie can scare you for life. Do not watch while depressed. I give it a minimum of 8 out of 10. Wonderful job.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
A Celebration Of A Mourning, 12 February 2008
Author: 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.

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4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Camille Claudel is an Excellent Film, 20 July 2005

Author: w-koenigsmann from United States

This is an excellent film and I highly recommend it. The imagery and soundtrack is lush, and the story focuses intensely on Camille's perfectionism and fortitude, all the while depicting her descent into madness, although some claim she wasn't mad, merely a woman ahead of her time, and thus ostracized.

From what I have read of various biographies of Camille Claudel, I understand that she was a woman ahead of her time; she scorned the bourgeois, just as many artists, writer, and musicians did -- in the same way that modern artists scorn the common, small-minded, and narrow society (read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf for a good understanding of the artist's situation in society).

Following the pattern of Vincent van Gogh and Franz Schubert, Camille Claudel was not a great "promoter" of her works, and, to make things worse, the bourgeois society, just like today, failed to understand her art (again, like the plight of Vincent van Gogh and many others).

At her core, Camille Claudel was a true rebel, not because she wanted to be, but because she had to. Camille Claudel was a true artist, in the very deepest sense.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Alain Cuny, 17 November 2009
Author: sandover from Greece

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I wonder how is it possible that, since so many of the comments deal with the level of acting in this film, no one pays tribute to Alain Cuny portraying Camille Claudel's father. His presence is, to say the least, commanding. Watch the scene, when Rodin visits the family at their cottage, where the two lovers half-hidden behind curtains indulge in their lust in the front of the tableau, while father Claudel slaps his son at the background. This is crucial, for two reasons: it displays that the actors here are working as an ensemble, and that the steeling and always, thoughtfully, underplayed tension between father and son, cuttingly explain Laurent Grevill's portrait of Paul Claudel as a believer's thrust undercut by a profoundly melancholic repression and the guilt of the witness who spills into being an onlooker. This is, perhaps, the grimmest intuition the film offers us in terms of the artist's relation to his place in society.

All this is brought to sublime heights when Alain Cuny recites some verses of Paul Claudel: not one of the film's tensions is left out and, yet, the instance breaks out of its context. This is a masterclass of acting in a nutshell.

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