Camille Claudel was a sculptor whose love affair with Rodin was the subject of a 1988 movie starring Isabelle Adjani. Claudel’s later confinement in an insane asylum is the subject of the newest movie from French director Bruno Dumont (“Hadewijch”).
Juliette Binoche, as Claudel, is occasionally touching, but as soon as interest flares, the movie suffocates it via endless takes of her suffering through daily chores.
The result is neither austere nor contemplative, just punishing and inert, an excruciating slog whose entire length can’t show as much injustice as director Mark Robson and producer Val Lewton did in one shot of their 1946 movie on the same theme, “Bedlam.”
Dumont cast real-life mentally disabled people, mostly women, as the asylum inmates, with their caretakers playing the nurses. The patients’ bad teeth and slack bodies are shown in merciless close-ups lest anyone miss the point: The beautiful genius Camille wasn’t crazy! Look at these ladies — now that’s madness.
“Camille Claudel 1915’’ has been read by a few as feminist. That’s true only if you’re the woman playing Camille Claudel.