BERLIN (AFP) ― French Oscar winner Juliette Binoche stars as Auguste Rodin’s ex-lover and muse who was confined to an asylum in the Berlinale contender “Camille Claudel 1915,” a role she said attracted her for its extremes.

Binoche, 48, who picked up her Academy Award for her 1997 turn as a World War II nurse in “The English Patient,” told AFP that she had exposed herself physically and mentally to play Claudel, who was a sculptor in her own right.

“The real challenge was to be completely bare in everything we showed ― the feelings, the landscapes, to be nothing, dumped alone in an asylum for 30 years,” she said.

“At the same time this is a major artistic figure with an exceptional passion to create and it shows what life sometimes does to people who have the most to give.”

Claudel, who left Rodin at the age of 30 when she realized he would never commit to her, spirals into a crisis after the relationship ends.

Her wealthy bourgeois family, unwilling to let her continue living and working in Paris on her own and repulsed by her eccentric behaviour and growing paranoia, have her locked up at an institution in Provence.

There she is surrounded by people with severe development disorders who moan and shout incessantly and need the most basic care. They were played in the film by actual patients.

Claudel stops sculpting, rarely speaks and begs the kindly director of the asylum to let her go.