Audience Member
Dark in its commentary about human nature, 'Mademoiselle' is both artistic and disturbing. Several say that it's the frustrated sexual desire for woodman Ettore Manni that leads to Jeanne Moreau's spate of secret violence against the town, but it's worth noting that the first fire set is accidental. I think it's more horrifying to think how arbitrary sociopathic behavior may be, that it may exist in all of us, and small turns of events turn her into a monster. The malevolence in her eyes is frightening, as is her cruelty to his son in her classroom, and we see how cruelty begets cruelty, as he dashes a rabbit repeatedly against the ground after an incident with her. That's one thing to beware of in the film, there is more than one scene of what appears to be actual cruelty to animals. There is also sexual humiliation - kissing boots, crawling on the ground, and getting spit on before being kissed - in a sequence that drags on over multiple scenes far too long towards the end. The film simply tries too hard to makes its point, sometimes with silly, obvious symbolism (for example, him unwrapping his snake and having her stroke it). Director Tony Richardson, with screen writing from Marguerite Duras based on a story by Jean Genet, certainly creates an image with this film, it's just not all that pleasant. On the positive side, he does capture several wonderful shots, mostly outdoors. It's as if he saying nature is beautiful, man is not. I also loved seeing Jeanne Moreau, who is fantastic.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/13/23
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Audience Member
Flawed, but interesting adaptation of Genet by Tony Richardson. Richardson seems to be a little in over his head with the material, but the screen presence of Jeanne Moreau and David Watkin's brilliant cinematography manage to make this an unforgettable viewing experience. The perversities and aberrance of the sociopath are disturbing but never explored deep enough to understand the allegory / metaphors at play. This experimental little gem of a movie has become a bit of a cult classic among art house cinema fans. I found it hard not to be pulled in from the opening shot of a vile woman opening the flood gates in her high heels shoes to the thud of the ending. And, I couldn't help but imagining The Stooges' "And, now I wanna be your dog" playing over an extended scene of erotic oddness. There are some very powerful cinematic moments to be found here.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
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eric b
Considering "Mademoiselle" is a Tony Richardson film starring Jeanne Moreau in her iconic prime, this is a strangely forgotten project. Why it is buried? Well, it's in black and white, and its countryside scenes are begging to be shot in color. It also has some distasteful animal cruelty and an understated ending that defies mainstream expectations. And perhaps it's somewhat disorienting seeing a French-language film shot by a director whose other early works ("Look Back in Anger," "A Taste of Honey," "Tom Jones," "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner) tended to be so intensely British in theme. In any case, "Mademoiselle" shouldn't be overlooked. Moreau plays the title character, a sexually repressed schoolteacher in a small, poor French village. For mysterious reasons, she is secretly setting fires, causing floods and committing other heinous crimes against her community. But her prejudiced neighbors instead suspect Manou (Ettore Manni), a Italian woodsman temporarily laboring in the nearby forest. His son Bruno (Keith Skinner) is equally disdained and even draws unfair abuse from "Mademoiselle" (her proper name is never given) during class. As the poor town's outrage grows, we come to understand Mademoiselle's twisted motive. Moreau was brilliant in these stone-faced, enigmatic roles, and this disturbing drama is another gem on her resumé.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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Audience Member
Bad person, good movie, sad ending. Trivia: booed at Cannes.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/23/23
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Audience Member
a very subtle horror film with an excellent villainous turn by jeanne moreau
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/09/23
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Audience Member
Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, 1966)
There are two things to note about Mademoiselle, which seems to have been Richardson's attempt to break into the French New Wave. One of them is the presence of the great Jeanne Moreau, whose performance here is chilling-one of the best she ever turned in. The other is the script, which according to the credits is a Marguerite Duras adaptation of a Jean Genet story. I don't buy that for a bit; this is every inch Genet, and I can't imagine Duras had a thing to do with it.
Plot: The title character (Moreau), whom we never know by any other name, is a repressed schoolteacher in a conservative rural town that we believe is in France (though it seems to have an awfully large population of native English speakers, some of whom complain about dirty foreigners-though one wonders if Richardson simply wasn't as interested in keeping his characters' accents in line). She's a truly nasty piece of work, and spends her free time trying to find ways to make the locals' lives just a little bit brighter. For example, in the opening scene, we see her opening a spillway, causing the lower parts of the town to flood and putting much of its livestock in danger of drowning. Good times!Sparks fly when she meets Manou (Johnny Oro's Ettore Manni), an Italian lumberjack who is the object of much of the provincial locals' scorn, mostly because he keeps stealing their women. To complicate matters, Manou's son Bruno (Romeo and Juliet's Keith Skinner) is in Mademoiselle's class, and she seems to delight in taking her frustrations out on him-which only makes him fall more deeply in love with her. You put all these things together, and something is bound to explode.
Well, "explode" is a bit on the dramatic side. Fizzle a bit, perhaps. Had Duras actually had serious input into this script-an author capable of drawing exquisite characters and putting them in interesting, realistic scenes-this might have exploded. This is why I don't for one minute believe Duras had a thing to do with this. It's classic ultra-shallow Genet, with characters who are wicked simply for the sake of advancing the plot (or for the sake of prurience, of course). None of these characters has the depth of a sheet of onionskin, and thus it is impossible to feel anything other than a certain detached interest in the goings-on, and that only for brief moments.
And yet still, this seems to have been profoundly influential on at least two novelists; I have never seen a closer antecedent either for the central murder in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango nor for the student-teacher relationship in Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher. (I am not entirely unconvinced there's not at least a strong whiff of it in another Haneke production, either-The White Ribbon.) Well, I do know a number of folks who think Genet is the bees' knees...
In short, it's not a bad-looking little movie, and Jeanne Moreau is always a treat, but she seems wasted here, in a story that could have been so much more than it is. **
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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