Director Jacques Doillon’s biopic of sculptor Auguste Rodin is filmed in the cold grays and whites of molding clay and sculpting marble. Its bleached palette attests to the myopic focus of the artists whose exacting technical skill results in works of sublime beauty, and from the start we see the banal mechanics of sculpture. In the film’s first shot, Rodin (Vincent Lindon), oversees his assistants bringing him various marble body parts, limbs later seen being fitted into holes left into torso statues like IKEA furniture. As delicate as the art is, there are ways to break down the process to make it more feasible, chances to fix errors.
This brief glimpse into the minutiae of sculpting marks possibly the high point of this sluggish account of tortured genius. Lindon, a marvelously understated actor, plays Rodin too close to the chest, depicting the artist as glum even at his happiest moments. We meet Rodin at a crossroads in his career: belatedly achieving fame in middle, he’s unsure how to navigate a realm in which he is now noticed but also scrutinized. Commissioned to make a sculpture of novelist Honoré de Balzac, Rodin finds himself stymied by his subject’s frequent recalcitrance, never bothering to sit and model himself yet finding fault with all of the artist’s mock-ups, particularly any honest rendering of the author’s prodigious belly.
Rodin here exists as a walking repository of artistic clichés, not so much conversing with others as engaging in casual polemics filled with hollow quips about the creative process. When some patrons amusingly point to a sculpture without arms and note is unfinished, Rodin huffily asks “Do you perfect a tree?” Elsewhere, he finds himself in the company of other artists, including a pre-fame Paul Cézanne (Arthur Nauzyciel), who bristles with jealousy at Rodin’s newfound notoriety until the sculptor reassures him that he himself faced rejection until his 40s and to keep going, adding “we only find beauty in working.” Cézanne, overcome by this facile proclamation, literally falls to his knees to kiss Rodin’s hand in gratitude for this pearl of vacuous wisdom.
Despite the artist’s thunderously dull personality and lack of emotional reciprocation, Rodin attracts numerous women who pose for him and get up to more illicit shenanigans. This leads to scenes of trysts that are perfunctory in their sexual frivolity yet weighed down by Rodin’s unceasing self-seriousness, and any woman he spends more than an hour with is gradually suffocated by his narcissism. This includes his wife, Rose (Séverine Caneele), who puts up with his affairs while offering occasional testaments to his genius, and Camille Claudel (Izïa Higelin), whose own artistic skill slowly drives a wedge of jealousy into their relationship. Claudel, a figure reclaimed from the scrap heap of history, has already been the subject of several films relating to her unjust institutionalization, possibly at the influence of an envious Rodin, but this film’s insistence on treating the sculptor as a beacon of somber genius means that the darkest impulses of his relationship with Claudel go unexplored. At best, they remain ominously in the periphery, leaving small hints to coming trouble; when Rodin sees a small sculpture Claudel makes, he‘s so entranced by it that the next day he attempts to claim it for his own installation. To go further would necessitate shifting attention from Rodin’s dour self-regard for his own misunderstood genius to the story of genius truly suppressed. Regardless, the unavoidable presence of Claudel’s narrative in Rodin’s own merely highlights the superfluity of yet another account of hollow male profundity, and the grayscale monotony of Doillon’s film marks one of the most leaden accounts ever made on the ineffability of great art.
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