Amour (Love)

The director Michael Haneke (left) on the set with actor Jean-Louis Trintignant

Michael Haneke on the set with actress Emmanuelle Riva and actor Jean-Louis Trintignant

AMOUR (Love)            B+               

France  Germany  Austria  (127 mi)  2012  d:  Michael Haneke        

Sony Pictures Classics [United States]

Winner of Haneke’s second Palme d’Or (1st prize) at Cannes, though overly morose, and not without some controversy, as it appears to be a safe and conventional choice, with a Nanni Moretti-led Jury picking this film over Carlos Reygadas’ 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #2 Post Tenebras Lux and Wes Anderson’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Moonrise Kingdom, both devastatingly original and much more inspiring works, while the talk of the festival was the even more fiendishly outlandish Léos Carax revival 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #4 Holy Motors, yet the director has made a powerfully devastating film about the horrible indignity of dying, and watching someone you love deteriorate before your eyes, where in your mind they’re still alive and strong, the way you remember them, except they’ve become fragile creatures that can’t help themselves anymore.  What’s different about this approach is Haneke’s unsparing and exhaustively banal detail in depicting all aspects leading up to death, including the unsettling, interior psychological turmoil that plays into such a personalized experience.  Perhaps Haneke’s crowning achievement is casting the aging couple with French New Wave cinema royalty, writing the film for Jean-Louis Trintignant (who’s 81) as Georges, from Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN (1966) and Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud's (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) (1969), a superb actor who hasn’t worked in seven years, while Emmanuelle Riva (85) is Anne, from Alain Resnais’s HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959), the one who has a series of medical setbacks.  Both appeared in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS TRILOGY, Riva appearing in BLUE (1993) while Trintignant was the lead in RED (1994), where both personify a cultured European dignity with an undisputed air of intelligence in their roles, which certainly comes into play here, as both have professional backgrounds living in an enormous Parisian apartment with an entire wall filled with shelves of books, including a piano, where she was a revered piano instructor, along with various drawings and paintings on the wall.  This couple is the epitome of cultural refinement, where it’s actually a joy, initially, to watch their clever wordplay with one another.            

The initial intimacy is followed by the realization that Anne is likely having a minor stroke while sitting at the breakfast table, where hospital efforts to restore her back to full health fail, leaving her partially paralyzed on her right side, requiring a wheelchair, where Georges has to help her get in and out of bed, her chair, the bathroom, and anywhere else she goes, but we never again see her leave the apartment, creating a highly restrictive use of ever confining space, as if the walls are caving in on them.  While they still maintain a daily routine, where the mundane details become the surgically precise structure of the film, they simply don’t get out anymore, so all they have is each other, music, and photograph books of earlier memories.  Their daughter Eva, Isabelle Huppert, shows obvious concern, thinking her mother should be receiving round the clock hospital care, but after her initial experience, Anne has no interest in ever returning to another hospital.  Eva complains to Georges, as if he’s not doing enough, but he’s taking care of her himself, feeding her, helping her perform the daily exercises, with nurse visits three times a week, and the doctor every other week, but Eva is devastated when her mother has another mild stroke and loses much of her speech, where her indistinguishable words don’t make sense and she can’t make out what her mother’s trying to say, which only becomes more disturbing.  None of the medical setbacks are shown, but happen incrementally, where Anne, once a fiercely stubborn force to be reckoned with, becomes completely helpless, requiring full-time care, which Georges is happy to provide, though it is exhausting.  He is the consummate picture of a man giving his undying devotion to the love of his life, where he is still consumed by her presence, still filled with the incredible aura of her life. 

But no matter how well educated and culturally aware, this never prepares anyone for watching a dying partner, where the daily grind eventually grows frustrating, especially when all you’re looking for is just a tiny sign that the person you’re married to is still there.  Haneke has a seamless approach to unraveling his film, where memories and dreams are mixed into the daily routines, reflecting the inner thoughts of those onscreen, where the mosaic of mixing them all together is an extremely accurate reflection of their existence.  So too is the way Georges starts hiding just how ill Anne is becoming, especially from Eva, who continues to call for the latest updates, where his energy to respond without anything hopeful to say simply disappears with each passing day, yet she persists, which from Georges’ point of view feels like an invasion, as all this couple has left is a few private moments.  The energy it takes out of her mother for one of Eva’s visits is something perhaps only Georges understands, which leaves Eva even more devastated as she simply doesn’t know what else to do.  Georges, of course, knows he’s already providing all there is to do, but he can’t change the agonizing twists of fate.  The lingering finality of the experience is hauntingly sad, as there’s nothing about it that’s easy or refined, where the underlying theme that persists throughout the film is a civilized and genteel couple who are cultured, who understand that beauty stands alongside life’s tragedies, but this still leaves you weakened and trembling at the knees, where nothing can prepare you for the inevitable finality.  Haneke doesn’t make any of this comfortable for the viewer, but it is a daring and exquisitely elegant portrait of what awaits us all, given a poetic and wordless farewell that has a touch of theatricality to it, where there are no neat bows tying up loose ends, instead there’s a sudden flood of emptiness, and the rest is silence.   

If truth be told, our own lives may have an overload of painfully prolonged and tragic deaths very reminiscent of what is portrayed onscreen, unfortunately witnessing too many people die in the end stages of cancer, so there is a certain degree of traumatic discomfort when encountering the subject once again, especially with the unaltered, unedited amount of realism mandated by this director, which to a large extent is the dramatic power of the film, the accumulating effects of death shown with such acute detail.  As a result, this is not a film likely to be revisited again.  The film is reminiscent of Maurice Pialat’s THE MOUTH AGAPE (1974), another film about a woman slowly dying from cancer, a starkly realistic portrait of death, told in segments of real time with long takes of her lying in bed.  While Haneke narrows his focus to an aging couple very much in love, Pialat paints a satirical portrait of the woman’s family avoiding bedroom visits or any dealings with sickness or death as they instead find ridiculous ways to pleasure and amuse themselves as they all wait for her to die.  In contrast, Haneke shows us the face of death through an exacting control over the increasingly oppressive material, confining actions within a ruthlessly restrictive space, which seems to parallel Georges’ efforts to maintain control over his beloved wife, right down to locking her inside a room so no one else, including her daughter, can see her in such a deteriorating state.  Haneke has always had a deep connection with suicide, preferring a dignified exit, sparing the dying from the agonizing medical atrophy, instead seeing it in its most simplistic light, which may be seen as an act of human kindness, however wretched it appears.  Once distanced from Haneke’s film, the more one appreciates a certain simplistic perfection, though one can't yet determine overall greatness when the subject matter alone is something that would likely never be returned to, so as a one time only experience, how significant can a film be?   Might the same be asked of Haneke’s own loathsome Funny Games (1997) (1997), or Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975)?  Still can't answer that perplexing question.  Final thoughts, however, are appreciating the film’s tenderness and restraint, including the unique way Haneke expresses compassion through unspoken, interior thoughts and a highly inventive use of visual cues, offscreen sound, and original imagery.

The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury)

THE CANTERBURY TALES (I racconti di Canterbury)            C+          
Italy  France  (112 mi)  1972    Berlin premiere (140 mi)  d:  Pier Paolo Pasolini

Between a jest and a joke, many a truth can be told. 

—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, first published in 1475

Pasolini was born and educated in Bologna in central Italy, one of the most left-leaning cities in the country, where his father, an army lieutenant with Fascist leanings, actually saved Benito Mussolini’s life in an assassination attempt by Anteo Zamboni, but during the war he and his mother lived in Casarsa, in the Italian countryside of Friuli at the extreme northeast of Italy, within sight of the Alps, where besides Italian, it was commonplace to speak the local Friulian language.  Pasolini fell in love with the language and is partially responsible for reviving and preserving it, as his initial books of poetry were written in Friulian.  For Pasolini, he began to idealize the peasantry of the region as uncorrupted by the stain of modernity, remaining pure and innocent, even obtaining a mythical status, as it was connected to a way of life in the past that was destined to disappear.  During the war, Pasolini became an ardent anti-Fascist, the strains of which remained with him throughout his lifetime, writing a sympathetic, pro-communist declaration for the front page of the newspaper Libertà, even though he was not a member of the Party.  In the early 50’s, he was forced to flee Friuli for Rome, as he was accused of sexually molesting a young boy as well as being a Communist, as the Party disavowed him as well, where his exile felt like an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, suddenly finding himself living in the shanty towns of the Roman slums, where he was immediately part of the marginalized society of the reviled, including whores, thieves, pimps, and criminals who had all been rejected by society.  As part of Pasolini’s refusal to conform, he romanticized this rejection, elevating their perception in his eyes to exalted status, becoming fascinated with the subculture of criminality that surrounded him, where he began to write about it in essays and novels.  “My view of the world is always at bottom of an epical-religious nature:  therefore even, in fact above all, in misery-ridden characters, characters who live outside of a historical consciousness, these epical-religious elements play a very important part.”  His graphic depiction of the Roman underworld brought offers of scriptwriting from renowned Italian directors, which included Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957) and Mauro Bolognini’s MARISA (1957), directing his first film ACCATTONE (1961), based on his own novel, where its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a sensation.  Pasolini’s film career was both scandalously erotic and distinctly personal, expressing his own controversial views on Marxism, atheism, Fascism, and homosexuality, culminating with the relentlessly grim SALÓ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975), a blend of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy with French sadist Marquis de Sade that was immediately charged with violating obscenity laws,  where the court challenges actually produced the opposite effect, as future films actually had far less censorship.  Shortly after completing the film, Pasolini was murdered by a 17-year old male prostitute who drove over him several times in his own car, though he later retracted his confession, where the murder remains clouded under mysterious circumstances.  

While this is not likely one of Pasolini’s best films, it is however something of a playful romp through the Middle Ages, where the director appears to be having a lot of fun entertaining himself, having a bit of a blast placing himself in the middle of the set as legendary author Geoffrey Chaucer.  Taking the unusual steps of making the film in England, Pasolini recreates the day-to-day feel of actually living in the Middle Ages, using wonderfully ornate and partly-preserved buildings still standing from the period, including the Canterbury Cathedral, where the elaborate costumes and exquisite details of the crowd scenes are quite simply amazing.  More than anything, however, what stands out is the bawdy humor and nonstop display of naked bodies, where copulating like rabbits was apparently the mindset of the times.  Only using about eight of Chaucer’s collection of more than twenty stories from his 14th century classic novel, they do reflect a kind of exaggerated grandiosity conjured up from the minds of the era, as each highlighted tale is presented as part of a storytelling contest by a group of pilgrims gathering at an inn in the 1380’s before they embark on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, enhanced by drink, the pleasure of women, and plenty of songs.  The second film of Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life, which began with THE DECAMERON (1970) and was completed by ARABIAN NIGHTS (1973), what they all have in common is an excess of sexual fantasy, seen by the director as a sign of liberation and freedom, an affront to bourgeois tastes and concerns where male genitalia is equally on display as women’s bare breasts and bottoms, but the quasi discerning public saw this as little more than Pasolini’s entry into sexploitation films, which were increasingly popular during the 70’s.  Initially shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1972, winning the Golden Bear First Prize, the film was jeered by the audience and subject to scathing reviews that ridiculed its amateurish editing and acting, along with its obsession with sexual intercourse, creating often confusing and clumsily mixed together extracts from Chaucer’s story, emphasizing the prurient over the grander notions of the novel.  Pasolini was so disappointed that it led to his final film, SALÓ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975), where his initial optimism towards the liberating effects of sex has been reduced to utter despair.    

While this was a costly production, with moments of supreme inspiration, unfortunately much of the initial criticism is warranted, as there is an amateurish quality to much of the acting, made even worse by the post-production technical flaws in being unable to match the lip-synching to the dubbed dialogue, which is particularly irritating in this film.  Pasolini’s use of non-professional actors, which in other films heightens a sense of realism, does him no favors in this exaggerated and comically absurd version, where the film’s deficiencies, not the least of which includes a rambling, disconnected style, diminish whatever critical points are being made.  Part of the problem may be the rather infantile and adolescent view of many of the lead characters, who are mere boys, and not really adults, so much of this has the prankish atmosphere of youth to it, where they’re constantly plotting and devising strategies to divert attention from the object of their real desires, such as removing the presence of the hovering husbands so they have free access to their wives or daughters.  One striking aspect of the film is how often women are portrayed as the exclusive property of the husbands, where the wives continue to lay in bed all day, supposedly at the beck and call of the men, which make them easy targets for the younger sexually charged adolescents who want a chance to have sex with them, as they’re otherwise sitting around doing nothing.  While the loosely-connected episodes are not separated, but instead blend into one another, using a different set of actors, the only indication the audience has of a break in between stories is a recurring shot of Pasolini himself as Chaucer sitting at his desk lost in thought, randomly flipping through various books in his library, taking an amusing interest in The Decameron, seen as an intellectual curiously removed from the constant chatter of the streets below, where offscreen we may hear the voice of his wife berating him.  Part of the interest in the film is the director’s own take on a well known literary work, as he’s also a renowned poet, novelist, and literary theorist, where his unconventional approach may illuminate a feeling of mutual respect between the film and the literary work.  The revolving characters, with their vastly different points of view, do produce a cumulative portrait of the era, but more pronounced than anything else is Pasolini’s visual design, veering from his extraordinary outdoor street scenes teeming with an overpopulated humanity spilling over onto one another, always vividly animated with music, livestock, and movement, to his graphic interior depictions of bedroom fornication. 

If Pasolini stood for anything, it was anti-conformism, where his graphic depiction of nudity, sex, piss, and vomit, not to mention sheer stupidity, was intended to be a kick in the ass to conventional theater by showing viewers what was not generally allowed in bourgeois cinema.  By allowing the film to evolve like a three-ring circus of neverending entertainment, the director has created a kind of absurd theater of the burlesque, using a series of sight gags involving characters dressed up in bizarre costumes often at odds with one another, using song, dance, farce, and slapstick as a means of provoking the audience, where the behavior witnessed is often ridiculous and juvenile, with people behaving like conniving idiots, where it’s more a mockery of the human condition.  By the time he gets around to making SALÓ, however, the outrageous comic spectacle has turned to torture, sexual abuse, sadism, rape, and finally murder, expressing the origins of his own disillusionment.  In equal measure with literature, painting, and sculpture, Pasolini’s film aesthetic frequently moves from one medium to another, but also one language to another, as Chaucer’s Middle English went through a series of transformations and was eventually modernized into everyday English, then retranslated into common Italian speech and slang, while providing an accompanying English dubbed version.  Pasolini disliked the make believe worlds of American films, especially Hitchcock and Hawks, and seldom referred to other films for inspiration, instead relying upon the world of painters.  Near the end of the film, Pasolini’s vision moves from the cluttered realms of the city to the rural expanse of the region with its small farmhouses and lush, green pastures enveloping a pastoral landscape, evoking paintings of Brueghel and Bosch which are not afraid to embrace the ugly aspects of a peasant’s life, where Pasolini has a tendency to elevate the status of lowlife whores, pimps, criminals, and murderers, who are viewed like saints, where the sacred and the profane trade places, where the ancient had more value than the modern, and the despised was more sacred than the Sacred, as the high priests themselves are despised and defiled.  In the final sequence, which borders on the surreal, Pasolini’s continued depiction of debauchery and church corruption leads to the Catholic church’s vision of Hell and damnation, perhaps the ultimate epilogue, becoming a caricature of The Last Judgment, where a long procession of sinners is forced to endure whippings and rape, while Satan himself is envisioned as the ass of a donkey, painted bright red, where Satan farts and shits out corrupt deacons and friars into a grotesque world of unending copulation, where people are continually seen having sex with priests.  Though it lacks the wit and savage humor of Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961), the film is a grotesque and comic satire of the church and its hypocrisy. 

Camille Claudel 1915

La Valse/The Waltz (Camille Claudel, 1893)

Camille Claudel

CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915      B        
France  (95 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Bruno Dumont 

There is always something missing that torments me.

Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering…I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures. 

—Camille Claudel in letters to her brother Paul

Another realistically severe Bruno Dumont film that seems designed to inflict as much misery and punishment on the audience as is humanly possible, an arthouse trend that is happening all too frequently these days, as if forcing the viewer to experience such extreme degree of discomfort is somehow a doorway into artistic perception, as if the rigors of sadistic horror from Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) or Michael Haneke’s punishing Funny Games (1997) have somehow been unleashed upon the industry, and what was once considered rare and extreme is now more commonly accepted.  Violence has made its inroads into the human psyche to the point where no one blinks anymore at human torture.  While no one is accusing these uncompromising artists of exploitation, but Dumont joins a growing field of highly acclaimed directors, like Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy, Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) (2012, 2013), or Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), who are perfectly willing to unsettle and extinguish any comfort zone with the audience, where if the expression is slavery, humiliation, or human torment, by God that’s what they will make the audience feel.  Perhaps it’s this insistence that the director must inflict trauma into the lives of the audience that comes into question, as art has the unique capacity to get “inside” a subject and explore internally without making the audience personally experience subjects like war, for instance, or suicide, incest, or murder, but instead poetically explore the subject through psychological implications.  One of the very best war movies ever made is Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), which powerfully examines the unending dread, fear, and madness associated with the conditions of war without accentuating the graphic nature of battle scenes, where the audience is lured into this dizzyingly intense psychological state of mind without forcing the audience to endure spilled guts and mutilated bodies.  Nowhere in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, perhaps his darkest tragedy, are we placed on the front lines, as the human drama takes place almost entirely behind the protected walls of a castle under assault—the point being, we don’t remember the blood of the battlefield afterwards, but are instead riveted by the human torment.  Somewhere along the line modernism has become associated with emotionally browbeating audiences, forcing them to capitulate to the director’s terms of emotional assault.  Thankfully, freedom of choice still offers us the capacity to say no to these rules of engagement.

Dumont is perhaps the closest practitioner to the Bressonian school of cinema, a formalist whose minimalist structure reflects an economy of means, known for reducing film to its bare essence, something of a perfectionist in filmmaking, where questions of faith constantly arise throughout his body of work, and this is no exception.  Up until this film, Dumont never used a name actor before, preferring to use unknowns, as his films are more about ideas and concepts and not about performances, a view shared by Bresson, where instead their artistic greatness relies upon the meticulous construction of their work, paying great attention to detail, where the viewers begin to identify with the world as the characters do, literally transporting the audience to a different time and place, where it becomes immediately recognizable and familiar, effectively using silences and long, observational gazes.  Veering away from the animalistic brutality of his earlier work, this is a thoroughly undramatic historical drama based on actual events, drawing upon the life of Camille Claudel through letters and medical records, much as Bresson relied upon actual historical trial records in The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) (1961), yet where Bresson’s Joan remains impassive and overly detached, Dumont uses perhaps the most internationally acclaimed and highly expressive French actress Juliette Binoche in the role of Camille, where in keeping with Dumont’s portrayal of realism, he has chosen an artist to reflect the life of another artist.  While Dumont doesn’t concern himself with the backstory, Camille was 19 in 1883 when she became a student of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, 24-years her senior, which developed into a passionate but stormy love affair where she inspired Rodin as a model for many of his works while also assisting him, as the two artists mutually influenced one another.  Rodin also had another longterm mistress, Rose Beuret, the mother of his son, and despite Camille’s pleas, Rodin refused to leave the stability of his family, so Camille left him in 1893 after a 10-year symbiosis of art and romance, continuing to communicate for another five years before a final break up, moving into her own studio and working feverishly, exhibiting her works at recognized art galleries.  Camille’s mental outlook, on the other hand, deteriorated, suffering from paranoid delusions, developing a persecution complex where she believed that Rodin and his supporters were plotting against her, becoming obsessed by the injustice of her mistreatment, suddenly finding herself alienated from the inner circle of artists, with Rodin taking credit for her works, she felt betrayed and persecuted by Rodin until her dying day, believing she was exploited as a woman.   

While she lived in a filthy art studio with her cats, broken sculptures, and her shutters sealed from the light, Camille remained critical of Rodin even as his fame and public prominence grew, believing Rodin wanted her voice silenced and was trying to poison her.  Her family, on the other hand, found her behavior intolerable, believing her “scandalous” actions only undermined the family’s reputation and good name, and just three days after her father died in 1913, the man who largely supported her and was her biggest defender, the family placed her in an asylum, where the perception is she was literally driven insane by the prejudice and discrimination of a male-dominated art world that was incapable of accepting a woman’s talent as equal to a man’s, where like so many other neglected women artists she was perceived as threatening.  Even today she is largely considered to be the most gifted female sculptor that ever lived, yet her accomplishments remain overshadowed by her infamous relationship with Rodin, who went on to fame and glory afterwards, apparently at her expense.  While this background history is a footnote, it is not included in the film which opens two years later in 1915 with Camille inside the Montdevergues Asylum, a Catholic run mental institution with Dumont using actual caretakers and mental patients from Saint Paul de Mausole, the institution in the south of France where Vincent Van Gogh stayed for a year in 1889 creating numerous works of art, where a similar device was utilized decades earlier by John Cassavetes in A Child Is Waiting (1963), which includes handicapped children from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California, one of the first State facilities for mentally impaired children.  In both films, professional actors are seamlessly integrated into an actual hospital setting.  The audience is immediately pulled into the noise and incoherence of the sounds of an inexplicable madness, where Binoche sits silently and plays uncomfortably off other patients.  Dumont creates an impressionist, near wordless work where sound alone is so oppressive that one instantly senses a need for relief, yet Camille is stuck in the suffocating atmosphere of endless rooms with no relief, made worse by being unheated, so one can only imagine the cold in these massive rooms where humans tend to get lost in the enormity of the empty space where time can only linger, becoming a matter of little consequence, as no one is “living” a life here, but instead exists in a state of mental paralysis.  The only way to survive in this madness is to lose one’s humanity, as you can’t allow yourself to feel the forcible oppression without being reduced to tears.  Powerlessness is everywhere, as patients can’t control their disturbing behavior, where one can’t help but be affected by it, as in this setting there is no place to escape from the surrounding madness.

Much of the first half of the film simply captures the rhythm of the daily life, where despite having the freedom to walk the grounds as she pleases, the interactions with others are mostly unpleasant, and the overwhelming feeling of boredom and endless confinement pervades every moment.  Camille, while profoundly unhappy, is not as seriously disturbed as the others and is often asked to look after some of the other patients, while it’s obvious she seeks solitary quiet and reflection every moment she can, simply overwhelmed by the unending noise and the horrifying effects of being stuck there.  When it’s announced that her brother Paul will be visiting in two days, it’s the first time we see her smile, where it gives her something to look forward to, changing the focus, as for her this moment offers a glimmer a hope.  Through the incessant unpleasantness of her confined life, it’s quite clear how important this opportunity is and Camille looks forward to being released, something even the doctors are recommending.  When we are introduced to Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent), a Christian poet, playwright, and diplomat, the point of view shifts, no longer seen through Camille’s eyes, but through diary entries and a few lengthy monologues about Christianity from the brother, an ardent believer whose beliefs border on mysticism.  While his presence is altogether bizarre, seen having dumfounding conversations alone in a room, as if conversing with his own soul, casting a dark shadow across an already dour picture, this inner narration is difficult to stomach because of the sheer fanaticism it exhibits, where the viewer is likely to be put off by the otherworldy tone of his outbursts, yet he is the rational member of the family, and the only one the family allows to have any contact with Camille.  But once he gets into a room with his sister, where the viewer is highly sensitized to the ramifications, Camille literally pleads for her life, but faraway brother Paul is unmoved and undaunted, convinced more than ever that her Godless sins have not yet found the light, that she still needs to accept God in all his crooked wisdom, not always easily ascertainable, even as she questions His existence anywhere on the premises, as what kind of God would allow people to suffer so?  It’s a cruel fate, made even crueler by the devout Christian rationale of her brother who insists she still needs time to get well, and exits unceremoniously, where imprisoning his sister is his way of saving her, reflective of the tortuous struggle for women to find a voice and a place in art history.  Twenty years later she would write, “I live in a world that is so curious, so strange.  Of the dream which was my life, this is the nightmare,” where Dumont’s portrait of doom expresses the reality of that nightmare in just three days.  Camille would spend the rest of her life (nearly 30 years) in that asylum, dying of malnutrition at age 79 during the height of WWII, where her family refused to retrieve her body, eventually buried in a communal grave.