Jeanne Moreau! Tony Richardson! Jean Genet! Art! Art! Art! Mod! Mod! Mod! Oh brother . . . Crazy, repressed schoolteacher pants after hunky woodcutter in small French town, setting fires and such to relieve her epic sexual tensions in the process. The woodcutter, who is even dumber and hornier than most males, stays in this town because he's apparently keeping every woman in town but Moreau very, VERY happy . . . Anyway, she eventually has some sort of erotic(?) encounter with him and accuses him of rape. None too happy ending follows. In short, a nasty little exploitation drama dressed up with bad dialogue, a draggy pace, and portentous acting. Moreau is terrible, and you have to wonder how anyone talked her into appearing in this piece of dreck . . . Did someone have proof she paid for acting school by robbing banks?
"The fire had been made just for him."
The film "Mademoiselle" from director Tony Richardson is based on a story by Marguerite Duras and adapted by Jean Genet. It's a riveting and very unusual tale of the violence of female sexual repression. Jeanne Moreau is 'Mademoiselle'--the only teacher in a sleepy French village. However, life in the village isn't exactly sleepy and peaceful as it becomes clear to the village residents that a malicious person is on the loose. Someone is responsible for setting fires, causing floods, and poisoning farm animals. Suspicion naturally falls on the unpopular outsider--an Italian woodcutter named Manou (Ettore Manni). Manou is already very unpopular with the jealous husbands whose wives are luring Manou off to dally in the fields, and tensions in the village reach boiling point after yet another disaster. It matters little that Manou is on the scene of each disaster as he risks his life to salvage the meagre possessions of the villagers. Manou's friend and fellow woodcutter, Antonio, urges Manou to move away from the village, but Manou choses to stay--partially because the women in the village provide him with many distractions, but also Manou thinks his son, Bruno, should stay in school where he receives attention from Mademoiselle.
Jeanne Moreau as Mademoiselle is magnificent in this role. She is at once the very prim and proper, sexually repressed school mistress, and also the wanton, violent woman who desires Manou and will stop at nothing to get him and keep him. The highly erotic scenes between Manou and Mademoiselle are perhaps some of the oddest in cinema, and certainly it doesn't get more symbolically graphic than Manou uncovering the snake he has around his waist which he then persuades Mademoiselle to fondle.
Fondling the snake, unleashes Mademoiselle's buried passions, and the viewer is privy through flashbacks, to the most bizarre courtship to exist on film. A horrible, seductive pattern exists to explain Mademoiselle's behaviour. Mademoiselle dresses--complete with make-up, seamed stockings, black laced gloves, and high-heeled shoes for each destructive act as she watches her witless prey--stripped and sweaty, muscles rippling for the occasion. Jeanne Moreau manages the duality of the role marvellously as she seamlessly moves from the bitter, cruel schoolmistress to the abandoned sexual wanton with a penchant for pyromania.
The film is in black and white with French subtitles. Cult film director, John Waters discusses "Mademoiselle," one of his favourite films in his book "Crackpot"--displacedhuman.
Interesting Work Here
MADEMOISELLE is the kind of picture that always caused Quentin Crisp to roll his eyes and hiss, "FESSSTIVAL MATERIAL!!" -- meaning too arty and rarefied for mere mortals chomping down popcorn at their local movie palace. A major thud in its day, this movie still features plenty worth seeing. Directed with intelligence and care by Tony Richardson from a Jean Genet screenplay, MADEMOISELLE features a story like a Bunuel fever dream, without his sly humor. Jeanne Moreau gives a subtle, controlled performance as the titular sack of seething neuroses; her first scene, opening a sluicegate to flood a stable while sporting fetishistic hat, gloves and high heels, all cut in counterpoint to a processional of priest and villagers blessing the crops, certainly grabs the attention! Watch her careful underplaying in the schoolroom scene where she fills her students in on that ultimate Gallic bad guy, Gilles de Rais. Moreau's one actress who never lets you down. At times way over the top (surely someone connected with this project could have given the scene where she ogles her sexy Italian's snake a second thought), MADEMOISELLE is a picture that's fallen between the cracks of cinema releasing, hardly seen since its initial release. In this satisfactory MGM DVD, at long last, you can take a look. Please do!
Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage opens with a couple--Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson)--being interviewed for a magazine. Every moment seems to teeter on the brink of some rupture; just as they start to get comfortable, the interviewer has them freeze for a photograph. After making some bland general statements, they both start admitting intimate details, confessing that they were brought together by mutual misery, then cheerfully claiming that theirs is a model marriage. The entirety of Scenes from a Marriage, which chronicles their emotional relationship even after their divorce and marriages to other people, continues to have these contradictory moments of honesty and self-deception, cruelty and kindness, concern and self-obsession--all laid bare... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Liv Ullmann DVD Release Date: Released the 16 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Scientist Bertrand Morane, "never in the company of men after 5," seduces women by evening and writes about the experiences in the early morning. Though 40ish and somewhat square, no woman in the town of Montpelier seems capable of resisting his earnest advances. Not much else happens in The Man Who Loved Women, but in the hands of master visual storyteller François Truffaut, the threadbare plot accumulates deep and ominous philosophical resonances. What drives Morane from woman to woman, and what accounts for his remarkable success? Does he secretly dislike women and consider them interchangeable (as one of the more prurient characters charges, to Morane's genuine befuddlement), or is his enthusiasm a kind of celebration? Truffaut refuses to answer plainly,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Denner - Brigitte Fossey Director(s): François Truffaut DVD Release Date: Released the 23 January 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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You are now entering Interzone, William S. Burroughs's phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia, and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought." In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Peter Weller - Judy Davis Director(s): David Cronenberg DVD Release Date: Released the 11 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This is more "straight" than most Godard films. It resembles the type of biting satire that another filmmaker might make; it's strange, but not as quirky and abstract as his other films tend to be. Herein, we watch a couple of country bumpkins go and fight in the King's army, commit various atrocities, and come home with the bounty they've earned (a briefcase full of postcards).
But, it's no great shakes. It seems based around a treatise that war is bad, because the masses are being exploited. There is no acknowledgement that war is sometimes reasonable or necessary, in the face of aggression. It's just the same old "the ruling classes are bad, and here are some glimpses of abject ugliness presented as proof" that was in vogue during the 60's and 70's.
"The cinema," Orson Welles famously noted, "is a ribbon of dream." 3 Women is one of few feature films on record as having taken form in a dream. The dreamer was Robert Altman, and although all his best work has an oneiric quality--the floaty zooms, the eerie pastels bleeding into one another, the slip and slide of characters' trajectories overlapping in the fluid accumulation of what passes for narrative--this last masterpiece in his amazing seven-year run of 1970s masterpieces is only more so. Shelly Duvall, that most unorthodox of Altman creatures, locks in the tone with her eerie portrayal of Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan hoyden whose nonstop prattle turns life into a stream-of-consciousness reverie even as most of the people in her vicinity studiously ignore her. Her... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Shelley Duvall - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 20 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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