More clinging to physical creation than previous films in which the characters of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel have been treated, the one signed by Jacques Doillon is in danger of being framed in the cinema of reconstruction of time, the torment and little ecstasy of the artist and other similar niceties that sometimes obscure the critical vision. Doillon, for a reason that escapes me, has never been a saint of the devotion of critics, despite the fact that less than half of his productions have been released here. He will not have better with Rodin than he had before with The woman who cries, The pirate, The girl of fifteen years, Ponette or his previous work, The magnificent My scenes of struggle, which happened with more grief than glory while other movies Outdated French nights are longer in certain rooms than you would expect.

The skewed lyricism of Doillon does not quote, nor does it sell the intimate portraits he has made of young people, adolescents and girls. Now, with a film of regal and sober appearance on Rodin and his relationship with Camille Claudel, it seems to distance itself from the bulk of his work. But I do not think it's like that. If something stands out in Rodin is the filming of the physical act, be it in the size of the sculpture (the sculpture as flesh), in the search for new textures coming from the same nature (Rodin's scene palpating and caressing the tree bark) or in the interlacing of human bodies in the sexual act or in the sculptural representation.

Rodin is as physical and organic as My scenes of struggle, so vehement in complex sentimental relationships as Le pirate or La vengeance d'une femme. It is Doillon in its purest form, perhaps less radical than the Bruno Dumont by Camille Claudel, 1915, the film about the sculptor's last years, Rodin's lover and sister of the poet Paul Claudel, but always more direct and crude than Bruno Nuytten's The passion of Camille Claudel, the film in which the character became a tragic and romantic heroine in the service of Isabelle Adjani.

The reconstruction of an era that is not aesthetic but rather ultra-realistic due to composition, type of light and relationship between the characters, should not entail easy labeling. Through an artist of the nineteenth century obsessed with affective relationships almost as much as with his daring sculpture by Balzac (which closes the film in the present time, outside the moment in which it was conceived and realized, turned into an object emptied of its meaning Doillon continues talking about his world, the current world, perhaps more tense than before, darker and bitter but always full of doubts and uncertainties not so different from those that gripped Rodin at the privileged moment of his artistic and artistic creation. your love relationships.