Bruno Dumont's film is best appreciated if the viewer has viewed Bruno Nuytten's 1988 film "Camille Claudel" which ends with Camille being institutionalized by her brother Paul and her mother. That act can be initially condoned as Camille needed treatment at that time. Dumont's film is based surprisingly on the letters of Paul Claudel.

In Dumont's film too, Paul does not heed the doctor's view that Camille is a docile and almost normal and could be discharged. For those who have seen Nuytten's film, there is sufficient evidence that brother and sister had been very close to each other and Paul had tried to make his sister's work famous. All these critical facts are never stated in Dumont's film. The religious fervour of Camille in Dumont's film is totally absent in Nuytten's film. The long religious soliloquys of Paul, fits in with Dumont's interest in religion. For me, Dumont's attempts at describing Camille in the asylum is merely projecting Paul's attempt at absolving his decision not to help release his sister from the asylum.

Binoche is always good in any film but this performance is not her best--which I am convinced was the one in "Certified Copy."

The only other Bruno Dumont film I've seen is the bizarre and shocking Twentynine Palms so knowing Camille Claudel 1915 is about an insane asylum, it's difficult to not expect something that will rock me to my core. However, Camille is surprisingly restrained. While this feels like a mature approach at times, it can too often feel like it's too weak on its themes of religion, sanity and art when there's such potential. A little more focus and clarity could've saved what would be a great film. What ends up making the film is Juliette Binoche's committed performance that provides a unique perspective into a personal hell. She certainly deserves to be called one of the best actresses of all-time and this just confirms it further. It's beautifully shot and constructed, but then this leads to it feeling too measured and thus too forced when it could've been much better if it was allowed to breathe naturally. It's a very interesting film, but I can't help that it needn't been as empty as it was.

7/10

The clue, of course, is in the suffix appended to the name: this is, in fact, virtually a blow-by-blow of three days extracted from the 30 years, the last 30 years of her life, that Camille Claudel spent incarcerated in an asylum. Made with a touching concern for the electricity and costume bills of the producers the film defines 'austere' and even when the camera ventures outside the vast asylum building it records only lacklustre greens and browns. It could be the work of Carl Dryer, Ingemar Bergman, Robert Bresson, or even, from a later period, Eric let's-watch-some-more-paint-dry Rohmer. What it is, above all, is a Master Class in screen acting by Juliette Binoche who, for ninety per cent of the movie, has no acting competition inasmuch as, in yet another study in economy, the producers surround her with real mentally ill patients, which, of course, she towers above in the way Lemuel Gulliver towered above the Lilliputians who tied HIM down, with the only (presumably) members of Equity being the nuns who run the place, a doctor who appears as bewildered as the inmates and, in less than one reel, the brother of Camille, Paul Claudel, who, in a well-judged microcosm, proves himself as evil as both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in his total annihilation of a single individual.

As you can gather it's not exactly a barrel of laffs but for students of great acting it is richly rewarding and, in its own way, as fine a movie as the previous telling of the Claudel story, featuring Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu which could, of course, by virtue of its coverage of her early life, be retitled Camille Claudel: Part One.