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.
© James Travers 2017
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Next Jacques Doillon film:
L'An 01 (1973)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.