...E il diavolo ha riso

This movie, most notable for its authors, Playwright Jean Genet, is a lost classic which one ups Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid in its portrayal of the secret twisted desires of the rural french. Jeanne Moreau stars as a teacher in a rural french village. Her secret desire for the Italian logger Manou leads her to acts of brutal destruction on the town. A brilliant story combined with luscious camera work and nearly silent but incredibly tense scenes with Jeanne Moreau lead to making this movie an absolute must see.

I learned about "Mademoiselle" from a "Salon" web interview with cinematographer John Bailey (see link below).

He pointed out a remarkable thing—that the film consists entirely of static wide-screen shots. No pans, no zooms, no dollying, just one immaculate, immobile shot after another. That's one reason the film, unpleasant as it may be, has a calm unsettling pace that's the opposite of today's frenetic films.

Bailey said: "...the fascinating thing about (Richardson's film) is there's not a single camera movement in the entire film...All the action happens within a static frame. This film is, like, two hours long, and it's absolutely riveting. It's so unlike anything that you would ever see now."

from Salon article www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2003/07/03/cinematographers

Few seem to understand what this film is about, which is rank misogyny. That's really all there is to it. Jeanne Moreau, an intelligent woman who admitted to craving the unconventional, was the driving force behind the project. She presumably understood the film's basic theme and went for it. Mademoiselle is sadistic, perverse, capricious, and emotionally comatose.

Based on a discarded screenplay by the sadistic homosexual Jean Genet who was on a mission to subvert normative society, and with some tweaking by others, including the doyenne of non-conformist romantic anguish, Marguerite Duras, and directed by Tony Richardson, who was himself in the closet at that time, the film's gay credentials now look obvious, though at the time the hidden meaning would have been relatively obscure and it is no surprise that viewers at the time found the meaning of the film as garbled as the various languages spoken in this French village.

In any case, it was hardly possible though to mask the sociopathic malice of the main character and the clear implication that heterosexual passion is a nasty disease - a kind of insanity - sufficient to lead, in women, to bestial submission and the destruction of men, and, in men, to, well, at least a terrible waste of resources (from a gay point of view).

The static, wide-angle compositions are a thing of beauty though and are worth watching for their own sake. The technique goes some way to represent Mademoiselle's placid detachment from normality, and serves to mask the obviousness of the message - without it, the film would have been too blatant for its own good. Unfortunately, coupled with misogyny theme, the catatonic presentation turns the story into a dreary and rather unpleasant slog.

This is a real gem from British director Tony Richardson (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Taste of Honey) and French jailbird Jean Genet, very rarely seen, filled with eerie and wondrous black and white photography courtesy of David Watkins, whose static camera seems to peer more deeply into certain moments than should be possible, making many of the outdoor scenes in particular feel mythic and fairytale-like.

Jeanne Moreau, as the sociopathic small-town schoolteacher, reminded me very much of Isabelle Huppert in another of my favourite films, La Pianiste - there's the same cold, reptilian, but hypnotically mesmerizing malevolence, and a desire on our part to understand what can't be understood. Ettore Manni, as the immigrant lumberjack Manou, has many moments of delicate injury and thoughtful reflection amid his lusty joi de vivre that makes him a much more appealing and relatable character.

It's a very simple story, and perhaps doesn't have all that much more to tell us other than people are unfathomably strange and usually smallminded, and that evil is mundane and often rewarded when hiding in plain sight in a fragile form. And yet the effect of it all is much more, and this feels both a very modern and forward-thinking film (the long, stationary shots reminded me particularly of the movies of Michael Haneke) and a very ageless film, unmoored from any particular era - either way, it certainly doesn't feel like it was made the same year The Beatles were making Yellow Submarine.

It falls a little short of greatness because of its slightness of story and lack of cohesion - most of the English supporting cast are a little weak too - but I can wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone wanting to see beautiful cinema and willing to go for a ride into the murkier waters of the human heart.

Jeanne Moreau is simply brilliant in this role of a frustrated woman driven by madness to commit evil against the world. It has an ending that is wonderfully realistic and disturbing.

Jean Genet has created a world of simple people who are easily manipulated by a brilliant woman and their own fears and the results are predictable. Evil is here seen as not something grandiose and politically driven but as a simple everyday element of human nature.

The film's pace is wonderfully timed to draw you in to this strange little world that somehow feels normal. Somewhere in our subconscious mind, we know this place. I, for one, was not entirely shocked by the actions of any of the characters in this film. The evil that can result when people are not allowed either by religious authority or circumstance to express their natural sexual needs is here examined in gruesome detail.

See this film. It is brilliant.