''Rodin'' is a 2017
drama film
In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-g ...
directed by
Jacques Doillon
Jacques Doillon (; born 15 March 1944) is a French film director. He has a habit of giving lead roles to inexperienced young actresses in his films on family life and women. Some actresses to break through are Fanny Bastien, Sandrine Bonnaire, Ju ...
. It was selected to compete for the ''
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or (; en, Golden Palm) is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the festival's organizing committee. Previously, from 1939 to 1954, the festival's highest prize was the Grand Prix du Fe ...
'' in the main competition section at the
2017 Cannes Film Festival
The 70th Cannes Film Festival took place from 17 to 28 May 2017, in Cannes, France. Spanish film director and screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar was the President of the Jury for the festival and Italian actress Monica Bellucci hosted the opening and ...
.
The film received generally negative reviews from the major aggregator surveys.
Plot
Auguste Rodin
François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor, generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a uniqu ...
has become among the most celebrated sculptors in the world at the turn of the century and continues to win commissions for major sculptures such as ''
Monument to Balzac
''Monument to Balzac'' is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in memory of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. According to Rodin, the sculpture aims to portray the writer's persona rather than a physical likeness. The work was commissioned in 1891 ...
'', ''
The Kiss'', ''
The Burghers of Calais
''The Burghers of Calais'' (french: Les Bourgeois de Calais) is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in twelve original castings and numerous copies. It commemorates an event during the Hundred Years' War, when Calais, a French port on the English Cha ...
'', and ''
The Gates of Hell
''The Gates of Hell'' (french: La Porte de l'Enfer) is a monumental bronze sculptural group work by French artist Auguste Rodin that depicts a scene from the ''Inferno'', the first section of Dante Alighieri's ''Divine Comedy''. It stands at 6 ...
''. His career has progressed to the point where he keeps a major studio operating with multiple students and many models constantly in the studio as he progresses on his current projects. Though a significant success artistically, Rodin's personal life has suffered setbacks. His relationship with his wife has become colder over the years and Rodin takes up a relationship with a younger female sculptor who fills an emotional emptiness which he experiences with his wife.
Rodin goes to visit
Honore Balzac to discuss making a life-size sculpture of the prominent French author. His original conception is to see the author as a primal literary figure whom he envisions as standing in a heroic posture and in the nude. As his conceptual drawings for the sculpture progress, Rodin then takes up the preliminary design of the molding structures which will support the sculpture which will grow to its full size as it progresses toward completion. Rodin does not have the benefit of Balzac as a live model for the sculpture and relies on a pregnant model posing in the nude in the heroic pose which Rodin wished to use for the sculpture. Rodin uses the increased mass of the pregnancy to mimick the somewhat oversized girth which Balzac's overweight figure obtained in older age. Meanwhile, his female sculpture assistant,
Camille Claudel
Camille Rosalie Claudel (; 8 December 1864 19 October 1943) was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity, but later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work. The ...
, confronts him about the prospects of their relationship which has become explicitly intimate, and Rodin tells her that she occupies an unrivaled place in his affections. She confronts him in order for him to sign a paper stating his intentions to leave his wife and marry her which Rodin agrees to do and signs before her eyes.
Rodin's wife is conscious of the fact that her husband is less than faithful and that their relationship has grown colder with the years and with her rapidly diminishing attractiveness and loss of youth. Rodin is uncommunicative about the issue and feels that he should live as if in an open marriage. He continues his relationship with the female sculptor and his wife begins to gather information about his mistress apparently with a mind to confronting her about the realities of Rodin's personal life and family. When the Balzac statue reaches its subsequent stages of completion, Rodin calls the commissioning parties to do a preliminary review of the statue. Their response is unanimously negative and stark in its disapproval. Before them they see an oversized and almost grotesquely obese version of the celebrated French author. The commissioning parties are especially disturbed by the prominently featured male organs which Rodin spent special effort to prominently display. There is no question left in the mind of the reviewers that the statue is to be fully rejected as both poorly conceived by Balzac and poorly executed. Balzac is deeply disturbed by the review though he remains silent through much of the criticism.
His wife has discovered the address of where Balzac's female sculptor friend is staying and goes to confront her. The meeting sours very quickly with verbal animosity overcoming both the wife and the mistress as they try to face each other down. They part company in a high state of distress, and Rodin's mistress then later confronts Rodin about his promises to her about starting a new life with her and leaving his wife. Rodin contemplates for a further moment and states that an ultimatum at this time does not work him or for his career and he decides that they must part ways. Although Rodin remains profligate in his sexual openness with his other models, he still nonetheless at least partially reconciles with his wife and the two continue to make their home together.
Rodin's contemplation about the Balzac statue has been ponderous and one day in his studio he gets help from one of his students to immerse an oversized men's overcoat into a clay bath in order to fully drench it in the wet composite of clay in order to prepare its application. Rodin decides that he will apply the wet clay overcoat by draping over the shoulders of the nude Balzac statue, thereby covering the original nudity of the preliminary pose of the statue and fully covering over the nude male organs which had offended the commissioning parties at the time of the first review. He allows the draped coat to dry and the completed statue takes its final form which he keeps in his country garden in his home outside of town away from his studio. As the film ends, the statue is seen years later in Japan where it is displayed in the Museum of the Open Air (
Hakone Open-Air Museum
The Hakone Open-Air Museum (箱根 彫刻の森美術館, Hakone Choukoku no Mori Bijutsukan) is Japan's first pen-air museum opened in 1969 in Hakone in Ashigarashimo District, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It has collections of artworks made b ...
) for the public to contemplate and admire.
Cast
*
Vincent Lindon
Vincent Lindon (born 15 July 1959) is a French actor and filmmaker. For his role in the film '' The Measure of a Man'' (2015), Lindon won Best Actor at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Best Actor at the 41st César Awards and the IFFI Best Actor A ...
as
Auguste Rodin
François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor, generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a uniqu ...
*
Izïa Higelin
Izïa Higelin (born 24 September 1990), more commonly known by her stage name Izia, is a French rock singer, guitarist and actress. Her most recent album, ''La Vitesse'', was released in 2022.
Early life
Izïa was born in Paris on 24 September ...
as
Camille Claudel
Camille Rosalie Claudel (; 8 December 1864 19 October 1943) was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity, but later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work. The ...
*
Séverine Caneele
Séverine Caneele (born 10 May 1974) is a Belgian film actress. She won the award for Best Actress at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival for the film ''L'humanité''.
Filmography
* ''L'humanité
''L'Humanité'' (; ), is a French daily newspaper. ...
as Rose Beuret
*
Bernard Verley
Bernard Verley (born 4 October 1939) is a French actor and producer.
Biography
Former student of les ''Beaux-Arts'' in Lille, he then joined the TNP Jean Vilar. His brother ''Renaud Verley
Renaud Verley (born 9 November 1945) is a French ac ...
as
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...
*
Anders Danielsen Lie
Anders Danielsen Lie (born 1 January 1979) is a Norwegian actor, musician and medical doctor.
Education
Danielsen Lie studied Ancient Greek (1997-1998), musicology (2001-2003) and medicine (1999-2007) at the University of Oslo.
Career Acting ...
as
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
* as
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a ...
* Laurent Poitrenaux as
Octave Mirbeau
Octave Mirbeau (16 February 1848 – 16 February 1917) was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still appealing to the ...
* Olivier Cadiot as
Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...
*
Edward Akrout
Edward Akrout is a Franco-British artist and actor.
Early life and education
Born in Paris, Akrout grew up between France and England. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before attending Le Cours Florent in Paris for theatre, followed by ...
as
Edward Steichen
Edward Jean Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.
Steichen was credited with tr ...
Reception
On
review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, the film holds an approval rating of 32%, based on 41 reviews with an average rating of 4.8/10. The website's critical consensus states, "''Rodin'' falls prey to the most common pitfall of artist biopics: depicting creative work without ever really unlocking what it means or why it's important."
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
gives the film a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".
See also
* ''
Camille Claudel
Camille Rosalie Claudel (; 8 December 1864 19 October 1943) was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity, but later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work. The ...
'', 1988 film
* ''
Camille Claudel 1915
''Camille Claudel 1915'' is a 2013 French biographical film written and directed by Bruno Dumont. The film premiered in competition at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.
Plot
At the end of her career the sculptor Camille Claudel seem ...
'', 2013 film
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodin
2017 films
2017 drama films
2017 biographical drama films
2010s historical drama films
2010s French-language films
French biographical drama films
Belgian biographical drama films
French historical drama films
Belgian historical drama films
Biographical films about sculptors
Films set in the 19th century
Films set in Paris
Films directed by Jacques Doillon
Cultural depictions of Auguste Rodin
Cultural depictions of Camille Claudel
French-language Belgian films
2010s French films