Jacques Doillon
2017
119 minutes
Rodin's The Thinker was one of the first pieces of sculpture that really grabbed your attention. You've seen this countless times, but the first time you remember it really affecting you was when you saw it in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art when you were a young corn dog barely out of your teens who didn't yet know how art worked. You were baffled--how is this here, you remember thinking, without realizing there are a few dozen of these sprinkled all over the world. You've visited several others since then, and the Baltimore Museum of Art has a copy you'll occasionally make a pilgrimage to see.
The most impressive Rodin work you've seen, however, remains The Gates of Hell. In particular, the original plaster that lives at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, which is worth the price of admission and features all your favorites in one place.
And only a few feet away you can see a larger version of poor starving Ugolino devouring his children, one of the best moments of Dante's Inferno.
This film has a lot of naked women posing for Rodin. It also has a very non-naked Balzac posing for him, to your relief. You weren't sure how that was going to work out.
One of your friends, who is an actual film critic, also reads and reviews lots and lots of Balzac on his Facebook page. You've read an inadequate amount of Balzac over the years, but you like what you've read. Every time your friend posts some review of whichever Balzac work he has finished most recently, you resolve to read more but never do.
Your friend is much better at film criticism than you are, which is why he has been paid to do it professionally you suppose. He watches at least fifteen or twenty films per week and does a weekly post on social media in which he gives succinct and pithy eight or nine word reviews of all of them. You lack the ability of doing this obviously. You're barely able to stay on topic.
Anyway, Rodin. Standard biopic, not much to think about. Et cetera!
Time to choose something different: