Rodin

Rodin is no plain biopic, and it certainly doesn’t require knowledge of his work to get hooked on the film. It’s in fact best when it does away with historical details and feels like a film about an artist and their art form, who just happened to exist.

But it’s still quite the mismatch of content to form — a movie as ordinary as Rodin himself was extraordinary.

There is never any doubting Doillon’s sincerity or artistry but his film is overly cerebral, unfolding in a series of encounters that fade to black and never build a dramatic momentum.

It’s a movie that already seems like a dust-gathered statue, rather than something vividly, imaginatively crafted to reflect the burning intensity of so passionate and forward-minded an artist.

Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Sculpture is the art of turning lifeless stone into something that looks alive, flesh, living bodies and movement. Jacques Doillon's Rodin, in competition at Cannes, does precisely the opposite, turning living beings - passionate artists, no less - into lumps of lifeless clay.