criterionforum.org

Anxiously awaiting:

Most of the British critics in Berlin didn't like it, that means it should be excellent!

I'll be seeing this in Paris in a few weeks. My French is poor, so rumors that it has long periods with very little dialogue is encouraging.

Binoche receives great notices for her performance as Claudel.

"An unsettling portrait of the artist as a mad woman, anchored by a riveting lead performance." (Hollywood Reporter)

"A measured, moving account of a brief period in the later life of the troubled sculptress... Binoche's mesmerizing lead turn... Binoche responds with the same balance of fury and fragility she brought a few years ago to Abbas Kiarostami's "Certified Copy," a similarly expansive but unforgiving showcase for her gifts. ... Binoche is particularly heartbreaking to watch as her demeanor switches from girlish excitement at the reunion -- the wildflowers woven into her hair are a poignant detail -- to panic and finally despair..." (Variety)

"Juliette Binoche Delivers Commanding Performance In Bruno Dumont's Powerful Crisis of Faith Drama -- A-" (indiewire)

"Boasting a mesmerisingly intense yet controlled lead by Juliette Binoche... Dumont has made not so much a departure from his previous work, more an amplification and indeed a deepening of it." (Screen Daily)

"solo una actriz como Binoche es capaz de encarnar a una mujer que no solo era la imagen misma de la tragedia, sino que transitaba de forma agresiva por emociones extremas y hacía equilibrios sobre la borrosa línea que separa la cordura de la demencia. En uno de los mejores trabajos interpretativos que se le recuerdan, Binoche nos pasea por un variado paisaje de emociones complejas que confirman a Dumont como uno de los grandes topógrafos de la atormentada interioridad del ser humano. " Cinemania.es

"La famosa actriz francesa Juliette Binoche sería otra de las candidatas, junto con sus colegas chilena y rumana, al premio a la mejor actuación femenina, a raíz de su representación en Camille Claudel, en donde interpreta con austeridad y fuerza dramática contenida el personaje real de la famosa escultora francesa del siglo pasado" El sol de Mexico

"a film built around a truly captivating performance by Binoche" Cinevue

"Juliette Binoche réussit une composition de haut vol, dans l’interprétation de la détresse, de la révolte, puis de la soumission et de la résignation. L’austérité formelle de Bruno Dumont, marque de son style, renforce la terrible impression d’enfermement sans espoir, dans un univers où la raison n’existe plus." La Croix

Timeout gave it 4 stars out of 5.

"It’s arguably the writer-director’s finest achievement yet. Atypically, he makes use of professional actors in the lead roles, and is rewarded by fine work from Jean-Luc Vincent as the hapless heroine’s poet brother Paul and by a wonderful performance by Juliette Binoche as Camille. Conveying the intelligence, anxiety, anger and isolation of an artist abandoned by her family, unable to work and forced to live with women mostly far less capable even of surviving than herself, Binoche displays both eloquent expertise and an admirable control wholly in keeping with the simplicity and clarity of Dumont’s uncompromisingly authentic script and direction. (Rightly, if perhaps controversially, the other inmates of the asylum are mostly played by non-professionals who are themselves severely disabled in real life.)"

For those with any facility in French, the March issue of Cahiers du Cinéma has no less than 15 pages dedicated to this film, about half of which are taken up by a long, excellent interview with Dumont. Highly recommended.

repeat wrote:For those with any facility in French, the March issue of Cahiers du Cinéma has no less than 15 pages dedicated to this film, about half of which are taken up by a long, excellent interview with Dumont. Highly recommended.

Does anyone know where to buy one-off issues of CdC in the U.S.?

I just subscribed to the mag via Amazon (I've been looking for ways to continue honing my French reading skills, so thanks for the heads-up) but with an estimated delivery of the first issue in 12-16 weeks (!), I'll miss out on this one.

If you also like Harmony Korine, you'll be delighted with this issue. The whole mag is pretty much split between Spring Breakers and Camille Claudel, 1915.

Oedipax wrote:with an estimated delivery of the first issue in 12-16 weeks (!), I'll miss out on this one

I actually just asked them if back issues can be order separately, because I let my subscription lapse for a while and missed some interesting issues; haven't got a reply yet, I hope it's possible!

Subscription is a good idea, it's a great way to keep up reading skills, and there's always something interesting - I'm constantly leafing through back issues and finding new stuff. Been tempted to order Positif as well, as it's not available in the shops here and it's too dense to really concentrate on in the library.

Aha, just got a reply: you can order back issues from DifPop for about 6 euros each + postage!

Thanks, repeat - although for some reason it looks like my card isn't working on DifPop at the moment...

Also they have no more stock of the current issue (Dumont/ Korine) which may be already 'épuisé'.

Any news on UK or US distribution?

Opening on October 16 at Film Forum in NYC; Kino Lorber is distributor

Thanks for the update! Hopefully Kino will release this on blu.

Soda Pictures are releasing in the UK next year.

Duncan Hopper wrote:If you also like Harmony Korine, you'll be delighted with this issue. The whole mag is pretty much split between Spring Breakers and Camille Claudel, 1915.

Which is pretty interesting as this is very much a Korine type of film though I for the life of me can't tell if it is a good example of such or not. This is my first Dumont and I have to admit it is hard for me to like it in spite of some nice lighting and a good performance by Binoche. The big problem is I can't tell if he's inserting these handicapped people into the film, sometimes to the detriment of whatever emotional thing he's trying to get out of Binoche, to accentuate the moment and present humility to her situation which would be interesting and make more sense of the casting or if it is just to turn the film into a geek show.

Again very interesting to hear from someone's first experience with Dumont - I would never for the life of me thought of making a connection between him and Korine! (Also I don't really understand what the connection is, but never mind)

The people playing the other patients are actual inmates from the psychiatric ward of the old hospital where the film was shot (not the actual one where Claudel was confined though). As to their "insertion" in the film, not to repeat myself from the Quinquin thread, but once again I think it's a question of ethics, of respecting the dignity of those people - to have had actors miming mentally handicapped people in a film like this would have been disrespectful to the point of morally impossible, I think.

I mean ok, of course you have Juliette Binoche there, but I think it's a stretch to say that she's "miming a mentally handicapped person" - after all Claudel was admitted for paranoid and unstable behaviour and probably felt very much out of place among the more seriously afflicted people. (I guess the big problem then could be: why do we only see her surrounded by seriously impaired people, and not others like herself? Maybe someone with deeper familiarity with her case, or psychiatric hospitals in the 1910's in general, could comment on whether this is plausible or not?)

The connection was the use of 'real life' people accentuating their differences. The mentally infirmed here and a whole lot of other for Korine across his films. My issue or rather curiosity has more to do with the fashion in which Dumont showed them in the film and not that they were there in the first place. It often seemed like Dumont paused Claudel's story to have a look at the mentally ill person session which is a problem both from the perspective you're talking about vis a vis ethics and more relevantly for from a basic filmmaking point of view. After all if the more is crippled from a narrative perspective whether or not it is ethical becomes besides the point.

I don't know, I think they are her story - as far as I remember (I should watch it again now that it's up on Netflix) the hospital scenes rarely leave Camille's perspective..? Aren't we supposed to be looking at these people with her, to get the idea of what it's like to be institutionalized with severely more badly afflicted people than yourself, especially for the kind of rather introverted/unsocial person she comes off as..? Dumont explains in that Cahiers interview that Claudel actually wrote about how she found the constant presence and sounds of these people around her unbearable, and that despite her paranoid delusions she seems to have often been perfectly lucid about her condition and position.

As to the use of actual patients in the film, there's this:

CdC: At the start of the film you don't hesitate to show the faces of the inmates as if they were monsters.
BD: I'm content just to film reality, to capture what for example Alexandra gives me. The only thing that depends on my decision is that I let her be. I bring her in and take what she gives me. When I told the nurses that I wanted to shoot with her, they were sceptical. But watching her I felt she had something singular to offer. She ended up being really touching and sweet, even though she seemed a bit scary in the beginning. On the set, first we were afraid. But our perception changed towards the end. She stayed the same throughout. When at the end she goes to find Juliette and she smiles, there's a sort of flowering. The inmates are quite simply being what they are, and the camera enters this being.

Here once again I guess it's up to the spectator to make of it what they will as to the ethics of this approach; in my view what Dumont is doing here is different from the kind of voyeuristic gawking at geek shows that TV and YouTube is full of, but we get confused because we're so saturated by now with that mode of looking. I don't know Korine's work well enough to comment on the possible affinities or differences, but again I think Ulrich Seidl is another filmmaker whose intentions very often seem to get misread in a similar fashion.

repeat wrote:Here once again I guess it's up to the spectator to make of it what they will as to the ethics of this approach; in my view what Dumont is doing here is different from the kind of voyeuristic gawking at geek shows that TV and YouTube is full of, but we get confused because we're so saturated by now with that mode of looking.

That's perhaps where that scene of Katia watching Jerry Springer in Twentynine Palms and feeling empathy for the people on the show who are getting jeering at also ties in.