Camille Claudel

It is rare for a foreign-language performance to be nominated for an Academy Award.

France’s Isabelle Adjani has done it twice, first in 1975 for her epic performance in Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H., in which she played the tragic daughter of Victor Hugo. A couple of weeks ago Adjani received her second nomination, for Camille Claudel. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

This one probably means more to her. Camille Claudel is a project that Adjani has nurtured for years; she selected her co-star, the ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu, and chose the director, Bruno Nuytten (one of France’s greatest cinematographers, and also the father of Adjani’s child).

And, of course, Adjani plays the leading role in this biographical film. Camille Claudel (born in 1864) was just a teenager when she met August Rodin (played by Depardieu), who was 24 years older than her and well on his way to becoming one of the great geniuses of sculpture. Camille was an uncommonly talented student, and eventually she became Rodin’s mistress.

This was a relationship as complex as the artists involved. For a while both flourished, but soon Camille felt smothered by Rodin’s greatness – and, the film suggests, Rodin may have felt his eminence threatened by Camille’s burgeoning talent. After they separated, Camille virtually locked herself alone in a studio and grew increasingly paranoid and unbalanced. In 1913, her mother and her brother, the poet Paul Claudel, had her committed to a mental institution, where she spent the remaining 30 years of her life.

The movie essentially covers the time from the meeting of the two artists to Camille’s internment. That is a morbid and grueling period, full of personal and artistic sufferings. There isn’t a lot of joy in this particular world, and Nuytten isn’t director enough to suggest why the creation of art makes such sorrows worth going through. Especially at a slow 2 ½ hours.

Obsessive love is a rich subject, and there are certainly moments in Camille Claudel that catch the heat: Rodin holding a candle over the face of a sleeping Camille, watching the shadows play, or Camille madly destroying a workshop full of her sculpture, including a bust of Rodin.

There’s passion behind the film, and a scary kind of intensity from Isabelle Adjani. Adjani has always seemed distant and slightly possessed, and it’s interesting that the story of Camille Claudel apparently means so much to her. The parallels with Claudel are apparent: Adjani, like the sculptress, doesn’t seem satisfied until she has pushed herself over the edge.

First published in The Herald, February 23, 1990

Jessica Tandy won the Best Actress Oscar that year, for Driving Miss Daisy; Cinema Paradiso took the Foreign-Language award. (The winner for Best Actor that year was Daniel Day-Lewis, who was involved with Adjani and later had a child with her.) Juliette Binoche played Claudel, admirably, in a 2013 film by Bruno Dumont.