‘Camille Claudel’: A tragic end of a sculpture

Bruno Nuytten's "Camille Claudel", the official French entry for Best Foreign Film at the 1990 Academy Awards will be screened at 3 pm on Tue. Feb 5 and at 6. 30pm on Wed. Feb. 6 at Alliance Francaise, Barnes Place Colombo-7.

Based on the biography the life of Camille Claudel by Reine-Marie Paris, the great granddaughter of Camille's brother, Paul Claudel, the film portrays the talented, beautiful, deeply troubled French sculptor who, for a comparatively brief period in her youth, was the collaborator and mistress of the greatest sculptor of the 19th century, Auguste Rodin, twice her age at the time they met.

The true auteur of the film is Isabelle Adjani, who was instrumental in its production and who plays the title role earned an Academy Award nomination for her moving portrayal of the sculptress whose collaboration/love affair with Auguste Rodin ended in bitterness, paranoia and madness.

Camille Claudel, who was born in 1864 in Fere, France, to middle-class parents, began sculpting at age thirteen. Her work came to the attention of a noted sculptor, Alfred Boucher, who began tutoring her. M. Claudel moved the family to Paris in 1881 so that his children, Paul, Louise, and Camille, could have the finest education available. Because of M. Claudel's job, the move to Paris meant that the husband and wife were separated six days a week. This exacerbated the tension between Camille and her mother, who is said to have resented her because a brother one year younger than Camille died in infancy and Camille survived (Delbee 37).

In 1884, at age twenty, Camille chose to apprentice with Auguste Rodin, thus beginning a professional and personal relationship that was to last fourteen years. During that time, the two artistes influenced one another enormously. Rodin was twenty years her senior and his work had become austere and predictable.

The film offers itself as a case study, an exemplary instance of layered representation. Beneath the apparent melodrama-a love story in which a historical figure, a brilliant woman, degenerates into madness-is the story of self-interested biographies and the subordination of women's history to the complicity of patriarchal interests and generic requirements. The film with a running time of 175 minutes will be shown in French, with English subtitles.