Sometimes a film is photographically very beautiful to little or no substantive avail. This is most often the case in Hollywood cinema in the 1970s and since, because the American industry puts more store in technical craft than in art, and in visual dazzle than in purposeful mise-en-scène. However, the same is true, on occasion, abroad. This is certainly the case with Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), based on Henry Fielding’s brilliant philosophical novel, and it’s equally the case with a film that Richardson made in France, Mademoiselle. His black-and-white cinematographer, David Watkin, contributed exceptionally fine, detailed work, especially in the rural outdoors, but the sordid fable wallows (as did Tom Jones) in its nervous and erotic impulses. The result is a despicable film.
Two literary titans are responsible for the story and the script: Marguerite Düras and Jean Genet, respectively. It’s a terrific story, and one that may have inspired, in part, two fascinating, marvelous films: Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna and Claude Chabrol’s Le boucher (both 1969).
Bizarre things are happening in a French village: a manipulated flood; fires. Who is behind all this? Why, the sexually repressed village schoolmarm, “Mademoiselle.” Moreover, the virginal, hence, virtuous Mademoiselle is above suspicion, which is cast instead, because he’s an outsider, to where she feels it belongs: an Italian immigrant, an impoverished (because exploited) logger, whom she secretly desires. This is Manou, whose rescue of farm animals, among other heroics, on the occasion of Mademoiselle’s first fire (an accident), provides her with a view of a spectacular man; she becomes hooked on the thrill and arranges subsequent mayhem in order to re-experience it. Meanwhile, Mademoiselle has drawn close to Manou’s motherless teenaged son, who is one of her pupils; but she turns on him, subjecting him in class to harsh and humiliating discipline, thus provoking a meeting with the boy’s father. Eventually, Mademoiselle simply uproots herself and drives away.
The narrative is nonlinear. The film begins in the middle, with Mademoiselle, out in the woods in the early morning hours, opening sluice gates; a stable will be flooded as a result. Mademoiselle, in black and high heels, is quite elegant; she is, however, no spring chicken. She is in the middle of her life. After this latest draught of mischief of hers, she is at liberty—on holiday, as it were—in the woods. She pulls down a branch of apple blossoms in order to fashion a crown (or, perhaps, halo) for herself. It turns out that she isn’t alone in this setting. An elderly man calls her attention, and when she turns to face him (and the camera), in addition to the flowers on her head, there is on her cheek a petal, like an oversized teardrop. The man means no harm, but with old-age rudeness he cheerfully says to Mademoiselle: “On a younger girl, [the flowers] would be a bridal crown. Now that branch will never bear apples.” Mademoiselle’s flicker of a smile is full of pain. Uncovering a nest of eggs, in the mother’s absence she picks up one of the eggs and crushes it in her gloved hand. (This is a film, be warned, full of cruelty to animals—images that crush the heart.) We learn the backstory by degrees, from flashback inserts keyed to Mademoiselle’s feverish mind.
Any intended assault on rural French xenophobia, or serious consideration of the dire consequences of sexual repression or prolonged virginity, is lost amidst Richardson’s apathetic tone and scabrous, decadent imagery. In particular, there is his exploitation of the boy, who appears uncomfortably grown in short pants. Why has Richardson transformed this pubescent boy into an overripe sexual image? In context, the aim is to expose, by her hostile reaction to the sight, the riot of sexual stirrings that Mademoiselle rigidly suppresses. Unfortunately, we are left with the image ourselves—and the queasy feeling that Richardson is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. While condemning Mademoiselle’s erotic view of the boy, Richardson is no less exploiting the same view, not to mention the trusting young actor, who at his behest provides it. In this aspect, Richardson’s film is depraved, or at least somewhere in the vicinity of depravity.
It isn’t the case that there’s no way around the problem of how to present this material. Richardson could have framed his shots of the boy more discreetly. Indeed, keeping the camera fixed on Mademoiselle would have helped underscore the point that Richardson presumably wanted to make: Mademoiselle’s fixation on the boy. Instead, he has given us large doses of his fixation on the boy.
Also, there is the sadistic pleasure that Richardson seems to derive, along with her, from the punishments that the schoolteacher applies to this student. Leave it at this: Richardson should have found more distanced and thoughtful ways to portray the uses to which Mademoiselle puts the boy—ways that would have kept the focus on her pathology. By more or less putting the young actor involved to the same uses, in his case with the camera, Richardson shifts our attention from Mademoiselle’s pathology to his own.
This freezing film stars an actress I adore: Jeanne Moreau. I have called her cinema’s greatest actress post-Garbo. Performances of hers for Louis Malle, Peter Brook, Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, William Fraker and Wim Wenders are among the most glorious imaginable—and among the most erotic. (Her performance in Welles’s 1968 The Immortal Story may be the most poignantly erotic one in all of cinema.) Yet Moreau hardly brings anything to her role here—just sharp poses and, possibly, a mouth more turned down than usual.
No wonder.
Tags: Moreau
