Product Description

International screen star Isabelle Adjani (The Story Of Adele H., Ishtar) is the creative prodigy Camille Claudel. GÃ(c)rard Depardieu (Green Card, Cyrano de Bergerac) is thelegendary sculptor Rodin. This is the true story of their passionate obsession with artand with each other. Both an inspiring saga of artistic vision and the haunting portrayal of a doomed romance, Camille Claudel is a beautiful and stirring cinematic masterpiece. A historically accurate depiction of one of the most important collaborations in the history of modern art, Camille Claudel was nominated for the 1989 Academy AwardÂ(r) for Best Foreign Language Film,and Adjani was nominated for the 1989 OscarÂ(r) for Best Actress for her riveting portrayalof the beautiful young woman who sacrifices her talents to flames of passion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9494 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-01-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 159 minutes

Amazon.com
"Miss Claudel has become a master."
"She has the talent of a man."
"She's a witch."

And so Auguste Rodin and friends neatly sum up the sad trajectory of Camille Claudel's career.

We first meet the sculptor as she digs clay with bare fingers from a frozen ditch, in the winter of 1885. By the time the film leaves her, in 1913, she's an acclaimed, if socially scorned, artist who's been committed to an asylum.

In the interim, Claudel (Isabelle Adjani) falls in love with the famous, older, womanizing Rodin (Gérard Depardieu). Claudel abandons her work to assist the creatively bankrupt Rodin, filling in as his muse, assistant, and lover. When pregnancy forces Claudel to ask him to choose between her and his longtime mistress, he won't, she leaves, and their alliance ends. This proves to be the turning point for Claudel's mental health; when her affair with Rodin ends, she begins her intimacy with insanity.

As her madness blooms, so do her long-neglected sculptures, which seem to come to life in her hands and arms. Not only a potent love story, Camille Claudel is also an account of art and its wellsprings, and this is where it excels, especially when we witness Claudel's manic genius at work, driven by the necessity to externalize her emotions in the forms of her sculptures.

In the end, the viewer wonders about the causes of Claudel's madness: was it genes, or her reaction against society's mores, or the product of Rodin's persecution? Or, as one exasperated family member terms it, was it "the madness of mud"? --Stefanie Durbin

Customer Reviews

A tragic fall for a talented young artist
Camille Claudel was the young talented studio assistant to Auguste Rodin who became his muse and lover at a point in his career when he was a commercial success but had become devoid of inspiration. When he refused to leave his common-law wife of many years to marry Camille, she had an abortion and then gradually sunk into paranoid schizophrenia. This is the basic story. However the subtle manner in which the story is told and the unresolved issues in the life of Claudel elevate the film into a work of art.

The film explores the artistic muse and their relationship with the artist. Camille was a muse in that her images were fresh and vibrant which inspired Rodin. She was also a willful and socially disruptive iconoclastic young women and Rodin is attracted to her outbursts of emotion. He is twice her age and becomes her lover even though he has a common-law wife that he has no intention of leaving. Their collaborations on his sculptures inspired some of his best work. Yet her father wisely knew that she was losing herself in Rodin, putting her inspiration into his products, elevating his career and not her own. It is the nature of the artist to draw from all experiences and resources around him/her for the benefit of their art. Picasso's paintings when he is in love and inspired by a woman are very different from when he is rejecting the woman and he paints her as a monster. The relationship between Rodin and Claudel somewhat reminded me of the relationship between Francis Bacon and George Dyer in the film, Love is the Devil. Once Dyer reached the point where he no longer inspired Bacon and was in fact a liability due to alcoholism and addiction and mental illness, then Bacon withdraws in much the way Rodin withdraws from Claudel as she becomes increasingly disturbed.

The film is very beautiful to watch. The scenes of Paris and the countryside around the city, as well as the museums and exhibition halls in Paris are very beautiful and grand. The acting is superb with Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu dominating every scene. Adjani has the ability to play highly disturbed women to perfection. She is in virtually every scene in the film. It is virtually impossible not to watch her when she is on the screen.

WARNING: DVD IS CUT BY 13 MINUTES!
This USA butchered DVD release has 13 minutes cut from it, excluding major plot points, whole sequences, violence, nudity and characters. This is NOT a review of the film, merely this substandard, shoddy MGM release. The UNCUT version on DVD is available in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, basically everywhere in the world but here!

a fascinating woman and artist ... broken under a world which did respectively she could not open up
A life in-between mania and raging passion
This touching movie - shot in following the biography written by Reine-Marie Paris - respects Camille Claudel and her tragic life most powerfully.

Isabell Adjani who pictures an amazingly striking similarity of the original gets herself as actress brilliantly into Claudel's personality which again and again links up a paranoid disorder with a brilliant sculptor in her own right and kind on its way down to an obsessively self created social withdrawal, unavoidably for women at those time.
Absorbingly, impressively and intensely Adani dominates for nearly 3 hours this dramatic course of paranoid schizophrenia of this extraordinary lady artist, an illness which is nurtured by affective, creative and wrecking actions and "happenings" and which - in a world dominated by men - has impeded her development of a successful and harmonious sculptress.

Undoubtedly, Claudel's fascinating fine art works of "A revolt against nature: a woman genius" [Octave Mirbeau] emerged from an intensive and artistically minded, worthwhile love affair with Auguste Rodin, perfectly played by Depardieu, a relationship which supported Rodin by its discrepancy and conflict as well but which, however, finally ended for Claudel in apathy and paranoia after a life of dissipation.

This movie is really genially directed by Nuytten and shows without beating about the bush or any kind of glorification this tragically ending, close companionship, a companionship which could have guided both to a cohabitation but - paradoxically supporting their individual great artistic intentions - split them instead due to two distinctly conflictive and contrary emotions and reasons.

... a most convincing und straight forward documentation about the 1st half of the life of a highly gifted artist