Rodin

Rodin is a 2017 drama film directed by Jacques Doillon. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film received generally negative reviews from the major aggregator surveys. Plot Auguste Rodin 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, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell. 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, 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.