Camille Claudel l915

In one section of Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel l915, currently playing at Film Forum, her brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent), the famous Catholic poet, playwright and mystic, describes how Rimbaud’s Les illuminations and Une saison en enfer actually helped open his mind to God. Rimbaud famously talked about “le dereglement de tous les sens,” "the derangement of the senses" and what is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander. He explains that his sister Camille (Juliette Binoche) is too sensitive a soul to withstand the powerful effect of such imaginative sorties on her mind. It is, by the way, unclear who is more insane Camille or Paul whose rationale for committing his sister to the Catholic asylum where she eventually spends most of her life (the film takes place over a few days during the second year of her confinement), constitutes its own form of derangement. Creativity, faith and insanity are the subjects of this portrait of the artist who had been Rodin’s mistress. Curiously Dumont’s film has little to say about Camille’s talent as a sculptress, which is like double jeopardy since she is silenced yet again. In the asylum, Camille also cooks her own food, since she’s afraid of being poisoned--though the movie is no Like Water For Chocolate. From the point of view of content, the association between rehabilitation and faith takes on an almost contemporaneous interest, due to the recovery movement where the belief in a God of one’s understanding is now considered part of the cure—an idea that is still unthinkable to most secular practitioners of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. Camille complains constantly of the harshness of her treatment and of how unbearable it is for her to be confined in an institution filled with gnarled creatures whose loud incoherent cries echo through the halls (Dumont’s apparently used real inmates from mental institutions  as part of the cast). Unfortunately Camille Claudel l915 often achieves its empathetic response by duplicating the very boredom and hopelessness that its central figure is seeking to escape. The severity is enough to drive you nuts. Bresson’s subject was also confinement, but the minimalism he subjects his viewers to results in a transcendence that's missing from Dumont’s work. It should be noted that an early scene of Camille being washed in a bathtub  recalls David’s The Death of Marat.

The Rules of Attraction

                                                                Photo: Indianhilbilly

The fact that voters in Maryland, Maine and Washington all legalized same sex marriage this past election day is great news (same sex marriage was already legal in New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia) but whichever way you cut it, mixing politics and sex always leads to a certain level of fundamentalism. The notion that we are all polymorphously perverse as Norman O. Brown argued in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (a 60’s counter culture classic) is an idea that has been lost in the shuffle. It’s understandable that politics should enter into the sexual equation since marriage provides certain conveniences and entitlements legally and economically. But still there is an underlying categorization at work. Instead of just marriage between men and women we now have gay and lesbian marriages, which one assumes also include transgenders and bisexuals. What if we took another attitude towards sex, going back to the notion of polymorphous perversity. Let’s say that sex is an expression of love and that if we weren’t inhibited we might have sex with anyone whom we loved, male, female, bi or transgender. Usually the idea is that one experiences sexual attraction which indicates a certain predilection. If you’re a straight man, you’re supposed to experience an animal desire for women. The animal attraction produces what Rimbaud described as a “derangement of the senses.” When the pheromones die down, you look at the person in front of you and decide whether the initial passion was a expression of love or mere lust. However is this a realistic description of what really transpires? Doesn’t most love begin with a conversation? And isn’t the conversation sometimes cut short before it starts by the labeling that makes people edit their own impulses?