ThiefHott Too much of everything

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

ferdinand1932 While the design and locations and photography are strong assets in this film; it is a turgid and melodramatic affair which demonstrates the limits of cinema to convey truth.The case is the use of the soundtrack music: a mix of Gustav Mahler and Andrew Lloyd-Webber that plays constantly and loudly, and would have made Max Steiner grimace at its over use as it instructs the audience how difficult; how ecstatic; how tortured it is to be an artist. And then it really counts the story elides the details at the end.This heightened and kitsch exploitation of emotions was once well ridiculed by Peter Ackroyd about a Yukio Mishima book: This is not writing, this is Barbara Cartland. Precisely the same critique can be made of this film: a deceptive, mawkish vanity project.

sandover 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.

MarieGabrielle And rarely shown on US television, I recently caught this on Ovation channel; luckily I have satellite.Isabelle Adjani is wonderful as tragic Camille Claudel, apprentice to narcissistic sculptor Auguste Rodin, who is at the nadir of his profession when he meets Claudel. Claudel is at first naive and young, falling for Rodin and his grandiosity, he declares her work genius, but gradually undermines her spirit and mental health. We see a foreshadowing of his envy when he first meets Claudel, and comments that at least she still has a passion for her art, which he has lost long ago.The photography of the stark and cold Paris studio in February is haunting, we feel the cold as Claudel sets up her clay in the crumbling white studio, with no heat or fire. Paris is freezing in February.Claudel's family denigrates her ambition, except for her brother who empathizes but cannot really help an aspiring female artist (unheard of, and certainly a bane to Rodin's ego).Eventually her unraveling begins, as she feels Rodin is conspiring her downfall; Claudel had suffered a form of paranoid schizophrenia, interesting that as a female artist she garners less sympathetic reviews than the ego-maniacal Picasso or misogynistic Man Ray.Overall this film is a do not miss which deserves 10/10 for tackling a difficult and painful subject some would rather turn a blind eye toward: women artists in history.

blanche-2 I agree with the other posters. This is an excellently photographed film, rich in detail, with marvelous acting. It is also totally depressing and way too long.I thought Isabelle Adjani's beauty was heart-stopping - absolutely luminescent. Those eyes, that skin - she is one of the great beauties of all time. That depressed me also, in the age of Brittany and all the other blonds. I suppose it's the foreign versus American perspective but give me my druthers, and I'll take Adjani's looks -- and presence -- any day!This story is being made into a musical by Frank Wildhorn for his wife, the beautiful and talented Linda Eder. I can't imagine a worse subject.