This is perhaps the most haunting story ever put on film.
As the movie goes on, one sees Camille helplessly fallen
deeper and deeper into an emotional void that is so empty
and terrifying that one trembles at the sense of the chill
produced by just looking at her.  One cannot imagine the
horror she feels in that void.  It is a horror film from
within.

The movie begins with Camille going out at one late night
to steal clay for her work, and ends with her destroying
every bit of her creation and burying the shattered pieces
back into the earth.  When she dropped the marble foot
into the lake, it almost produced a sense of relief.  One
feels that she was finally leaving Rodin behind, but the
next scene was Camille smashing her sculptures one by one.
And one by one, the viewer sees her destroying every bit
of her creative genius, and bit by bit, she destroyed her
life.  The final master stroke was when she embraced the
first sculpture (of someone who loved her but never told
her so) she ever did.  Her inner self and inner horror
came out in the most desperate cry.  But, we know that
she must smash this very last sculpture.  It was her last
desperate attempt to save herself.  The extreme pain and
suffering comes through and shakes us to the core.
 
In this movie, Isabelle Adjani comes out as a master of
her art.  It is difficult to believe that such a performance
did not win her an Oscar.  The movie begins slowly, but
when the movie is all over, one can think back and find
the beginning an inseparable part.  Most of what was to
happen later were all hinted in the slow beginning.
After Camille left Rodin, the artistic talent of Adjani
came out like a fire.  The movie is in French (subtitled
with English), but at the latter stage of the movie,
one no longer needs the subtitle.  It was not that I
suddenly understood French better, but rather the
conversation did not matter anymore.  Adjani's raw emotion
erupted, and one was overwhelmed by wave after wave of
extreme emotion of love, pain and suffering.  In one
scene, her apartment was flooded and Blot (the only one
who understood her) came down and tried to talk her out
of her desperation.  The conversation of her sending
"cat shit" to the minister of culture was even mildly amusing,
but then Adjani gave the most heart wrenching performance:
"But I am afraid ALL the time; I am afraid ALL the time".
The next scene is Camille's "one-man" show, and she showed
up in a strange dress and looked like a clown.  The
background noise were bits and pieces of comments from
the high society people, and for a moment we saw Camille
stood among the crowd.  She looked like a bird in a cage
with her eyes flashing from place to place completely
terrified.
 
The ultimate tragedy is at the end when Camille was
forced to spend the rest of her life in an asylum.  One
can only imagine what life was like for the last thirty
years of her life.  A story of a delicate bell jar
being smashed in the cold world of steel and bronze.
 
With all that being said, it is not a movie for everyone.
Most of what is there deals with extreme emotion, and
it probably would not produce the same reaction to the
many who have lived a calm and serene life; but for some
of us, we understand.

Eugene Xia