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Mademoiselle

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This is a unique film experience, complex and odd.

The story is that of a spinster school teacher, Mademoiselle, played by Jeanne Moreau. She is the adored school teacher in a rural French village. Yet, she engages in acts of secret destruction that bring havoc to the people of the little village. Her first act of destruction seems to be accidental but when she finds that her handsome Italian dream man comes to the rescue, she creates more and more havoc.

She meets the masculine handsome Italian woodcutter, Manou, in the forrest and insists that his adolescent son, Bruno, come to school. Yet, as her desire for Manou increases, she becomes more cruel to Manou's son and her destructive acts in the village increase. In one telling scene, Mademoiselle tells the school children of Gilles de Rais who cannibalized Franch village children

Jeanne Moreau does an excellent job of playing this complex and disturbed woman. She dresses up in spike heels and black lace gloves before flooding a farm or burning a barn. She is a woman tormented by her desires, both hating and loving the man of her desires.

Manou is also exceptionally well played. He is heroic, helping to save farm animals from drowning or saving belongings from burning farm houses. He loves women and makes love to many of the plain, French housewives in the village. He is entertained by women. He and Mademoiselle make love in the forrests and woods all night and Mademoiselle allows all her repressed sexuality to erupt. Manou laughs in amusement as she licks his dirty work boots. He calls her like a dog and she bows to him while trying to stay hidden in his shadow. She barks like a dog during their lovemaking and howls at the moon when he plays dead in the shallows of the lake. Yet, despite the sexual power he displays in the dominance he exerts on Mademoiselle, he is a big handsome dumb hunky fool. The tensions in the town rise to the breaking point. Manou is having sex with all the French farm women and their daughters and the men are getting pretty steamed-up. The fires, floods, and poisoned wells are detroying the town financially. And yet Manou will not take his son Bruno and move on. Manou thinks that Mademoiselle is teaching his son in school and thus they need to remain so that the son gets an education. Yet Mademoiselle takes out her sexual frustration on Bruno, trying to shame him in front of the other students.

Bruno, the son of the Italian woodsman, also is a complex character. He is an adolescent of around 13 or 14 wishing to wear the adult pants of his father. He falls for his teacher Mademoiselle and steals her handkerchief. Manou later discovers this and thinks that his brooding son is in love with a local French farm girl. Little does he know that Bruno hides in the shadows, crying over the cruelty he experiences from Mademoiselle at school and his father's rough insensitive reading of his son's moods. It is Bruno who realizes that it is Mademoiselle who is burning farms, due to a page from a school workbook she uses to light a flame in a haystack. Yet he does not tell on her, which leads to the tragedy of his father's murder by the farmers. Richardson did an excellent job of capturing the emerging sexuality of Bruno. His father won't let him wear long pants and inssits that he remain in school boy shorts. Yet Bruno's long well developed manly legs reveal that he is no longer a child.

The photography in this black and white film was exceptional. The French countryside was amazingly beautiful. The forrests and lakes and meadows were full of wildlife and beauty. The village was superb, strong buildings made of stone and timber, clustering in a natural evolution of function for farm families. Richardson frequently creates broad vistas with human and their interactions emeging on the edges.

I would strongly recommend this unique film to many of my friends who can accept the implicit, the vague, the unsolved mystery style of this film. I would not recomment it to folks who want a clear plot, clear lines between good and evil, and resolution and justice in the ending. This film will haunt you.

Opening shot: In the countryside a religious procession moves along under a hot sun. Somewhere in the hills above Jeanne Moreau cranks open a floodgate. She is wearing black fishnet gloves, a black dress and heels. The water pours downhill toward a farm flooding it. The church bell rings alerting everyone of the disaster, the procession disperses, and Moreau heads down hill to watch as they all try to save the livestock from drowning.

Tony Richardson directed Tom Jones and in that picture showed he had quite a knack for capturing English rural folk. But with this tale filmed in a gorgeous tinted black and white which makes apple blossoms look more beautiful than they ever do in color he has swapped the 18th Century ribaldry of Fielding for the 20th Century subversive austerity of Genet and made a French language film which I'm certain raised quite a few eyebrows, French and English, in its day. Its shock value I do not think has diminished much, if at all.

The star of the film is Jeanne Moreau as the chaste schoolmistress who comes from the city to educate the rural children. But lurking within her cool reserved impassive demeanor are passions that have perhaps been too long divorced from nature so she is especially vulnerable when her long hidden passions are stirred by the presence of an Italian woodsman who she spies on one of her solitary strolls through the woods. "Be careful miss," yells one of the villagers as he sees her heading toward the woods, "there's a wolf in those woods." But thats just what shes seeking. Meanwhile a series of fires have been set and being the foreigner the Italian woodsman is the the prime suspect. We know who it is however setting those fires, and we slowly learn why. Tony Richardson captures Moreaus face as it changes from mood to mood. He captures her melancholy and isolation as she applies her lipstick and puts her hair up in preparation for one of her "acts", and then he shows what she looks like when she returns and looks in the mirror again seeing how the "act" has changed her. Moreau is one of the more mysterious beauties of French cinema and in this role that beauty is used to greater effect than any other director has used it. She is fascinating to watch as this prim sophisticated schoolmistress who finally undergoes the transformation she has been longing for.The night Moreau and the woodsman spend together is one of unleashed instinct and abandon and it is all filmed in an unforgettable series of vignettes: the two lying down in tall grass as the sun goes down, beside a pond in utter darkness as a storm breaks, running from each other and surrendering to each other time and again. Raw and sensual as anything you will see in a film then or now Richardson takes the film to a completely different plane with these scenes. When Moreau returns to the village the next morning covered in mud and clothes in shreds the villagers ask her if it was the Italian. Her answer and her final expression seen from a car window as she drives away from the village is one of utter self-content.

Also recommended: Elevator to the Gallows, The Lover, Bride Wore Black.

There have been a series of fires to the farms on a small French village. The villagers suspect a hunky Italian who has been sleeping around with their women, but the viewers know from the first scene that the culprit is "Mademoiselle," the schoolteacher played by Jeanne Moreau.

Scripted by Jean Genet, the plotline is merely an excuse to explore the violent dynamics of sexual desire, with the hunky Italian symbolizing masculine virility and the French schoolteacher symbolizing feminine repression. The two eventually clash, leading to a disturbingly erotic sequence with all of the sexual symbolism expected from Genet (including lovers spitting at each other).

Shot in black and white, British director Tony Richardson is at the top of his game, making the most of the sexual symbolism without verging on what could have easily become high camp. Although Jean Genet reportedly didn't like her in the part, I think Jeanne Moreau, as Mademoiselle, is simply excellent. She suggests more sexuality and especially perverse desire with a simple gesture of the mouth than someone like Sharon Stone ever did with all her nudity in the Basic Instinct movies. Ettore Manni, as the Italian object of Mademoiselle's affections, is merely required to look hot and virile, which he does.

This film is not for everybody, but the film will be of interest for anyone looking for a visually sophisticated take on sexual perversity and repression and for fans of the great Jeanne Moreau.

Depicting the story of a sexually frustrated French schoolteacher's relationship with a sexy Italian woodcutter and his son, this 1966 film is probably one of the more provocative and unusual films from the mid-1960s. Definitely something different for the discriminating filmgoer of the day. Directed by Oscar-winner Tony Richardson ("Tom Jones") from a script by the legendary Jean Genet ("Querelle"), "Mademoiselle" is notable for its striking black & white cinematography and, most especially, a spellbinding performance from the great Jeanne Moreau ("Jules and Jim"). It's stylish and well-made, to be sure, but this unusual picture probably isn't for all tastes. If you're a fan of Genet, Moreau, or off-beat European cinema, "Mademoiselle" comes highly recommended, for others the film may ultimately be too self-conscious, slow-going and demanding to make for a rewarding viewing experience. But, again, for the discriminating movie lover looking for something different, it's definitely worth a look. The MGM DVD release is fine, if bare-bones simple. It includes a rather haunting theatrical trailer, but, unfortunately, doesn't feature the film's alternate English soundtrack (it was released in both French and English language versions). Too bad MGM chose not to add this extra, as the English dub (featuring Moreau's own voice) is actually quite well done.

Fans of "The Piano Teacher", take note. Here Jeanne Moreau plays an extremely uptight, sexually repressed school teacher in a French village whose unrequited lust (up to a point) for an Italian laborer (Ettore Manni) manifests itself in arson, acts of cruelty against animals, and the daily humiliation of the laborer's son in her classroom. Where Isabelle Huppert would "control" her desires by inflicting the pain on herself (in "Piano Teacher"), inversely Moreau has the beautiful French countryside to ravage. We watch the cycle of rage perpetuate itself as Manni, due to the xenophobic hostility of the villagers, becomes the fall guy for Moreau's psychopathic actions, and takes out his beleagured emotions on his son by slapping him around.

The deliberate pace (a screenplay by J. Genet) becomes hypnotic after awhile, as the characters are positioned at the wide screen's edges, loitering there, dwarfed by the beautifully shot black-and-white landscape: Rain falls in a pond and the camera lingers on the still water disturbed; a long shot of a tree falling as Moreau & Manni face off in the foreground; the genesis of fire in a match, pure and neutral, to its swift incarnation as a blaze, out of control and taking no prisoners. The little house has been consumed with the prairie. Tony Richardson contrasts the "nature" shots with close-ups so, well, close up that Manni's pores threaten to drench the lens with sweat. We guys reach for our chins, remembering that we need a shave.

Stick with this movie - there is no exit and Genet wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

a schoolteacher in some French village, a spinster, (who surely can't be unattractive since played by Jeanne Moreau), is an incarnation of evil: she opens the gates to flood the village corrals, burns the barns and houses (causing at least one death), poisons cattle pond, causing major distress and devastation.

why? because of her (surely sick and twisted) love to an Italian seasonal worker, who comes in the summer to cut trees in the nearby forest. incarnation of manliness, real macho, he slept with probably most of the wives and daughters of the village men, but otherwise he's harmless and good-natured if somewhat primitive man.

at the end of the film Italian is killed by the posse when locals become convinced that he's behind all the calamities visited on their village since he came to do his seasonal work. nobody suspects Mademoiselle, and she even implicates him in the rape after their night of love in the fields (shown in long frighteningly detailed scenes) .

Italian worker's son is Mademoiselle's pupil, and she treats him in school harshly, to say the least. The boy, who's probably around 13, falls in love with her nevertheless, and when he finds out that she's the arsonist, he keeps it to himself, even though he has plenty of reasons to denounce her to the local authorities.

the film is amazingly good, another example of the "unknown great cinema". there are some more obvious moments, for instance when the camera is showing Mademoiselle's pupil reflecting the burning barn (which she has put to fire). but otherwise the film is very realistic and complex, its power mostly in the director's vision, camerawork and absolutely beautiful cast.

I was surprised to learn (after i watched the film) that Tony Richardson is the director. I like his "The Loved One" very much, but "Mademoiselle" is so different in any and every respect that i'd have never guessed it's the same author. I like his "kitchen sink realism" films too, obviously, but Mademoiselle does stand out.

and this film is so French - it's difficult to believe it's been produced by a British director, even though Jean Genet wrote the original story, and Marguerite Duras was a scriptwriter.

is Tony Richardson misogynistic? I think this is a very superficial view. don't jump to conclusions. First watch his The Loved One - and you'll see clearly that he's not misogynistic. He's misanthropic. Ugly, ignorant and xenophobic villagers, reminding of Breughel, their women falling en masse for the beautiful Italian who's shown more like a nice animal rather than fully human... and the main character, Mademoiselle, as a metaphor of God's punishment sent to the humans for their sinful ways...

Mademoiselle performed by Jeanne Moreau, who is in her own rights probably one of cinema's most alluring women, opens the gates of a small dam. The calm water begins seeping through the gradually opening crack as the tiny stream quickly turns into a rapid river that floods a small farm where tied up animals disappear underneath the surface. This gruesome event unveils the dark nature of Mademoiselle as she returns to her home above the school in which she teaches. The wicked Mademoiselle leaves the townsfolk's in a hazy mist of confusion as they brood over the identity of the maniac behind the crime as her true nature is as evident as an innocent infant's search for a mother's warm embrace.

Mademoiselle callously continues to hides her evidence as she plans further dreadful deeds. The police are blindsided by the high number of unexpected arsons and malevolent crimes as there seems to be no reason behind the wrongdoings. The heinous crimes provoke escalating tumult within the village that demand answers and a stop to the dreadful acts. The townsfolk point their fingers towards the foreign woodsman as they begin to whisper and secretively plot his demise.

Most of all, Mademoiselle is an interesting character study, as the psychology of the main character is dissected through visual symbolism and the clear-cut storyline. The symbolism strikes through in several scenes, but the scene that might be the most pungent is when Mademoiselle shakes hands with the husky Italian Manou (Ettore Manni) and a snake embraces their handshake. The snake scene oozes of bad omen as well as a sexual tension between the characters. In a sense, the snake scene is a visual culmination of the dreaded nature of Mademoiselle, which could be comparable to a black widows tendency to kill her mate after copulation.

Tony Richardson brings a tremendously well directed cinematic experience to the audience which offers both contemplation and bewilderment. It is the fusion of thought and puzzlement where the audience is allowed to step into the world of Mademoiselle where good and evil coexist. Jeanne Moreau's performance as the maliciously vindictive teacher that torments students is breathtaking. Ultimately the audience is to experience a well made film that offers much for the eye to be pondered and debated.

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!

The legendary Jeanne Moreau stars as Mademoiselle, a school teacher, filled with repressed sexual urges, in a small French village. She finds ways to vent her desires, mostly through arson and other destructive acts.

Mademoiselle seems like a film that desperately wants to be profound. It seems like a film that wants to say something about repressing desires, and the insignificance of mankind against nature. For the most part, it fails. It is unclear whether Mademoiselle's violent actions are the product of sexual desire or simple sadism. She sets fires and opens floodgates, but is it a sexual urge? Not really, she just seems to get a kick out of watching the townspeople scramble to save their lives and possessions.

And while the film is directed with an interesting visual flair that does often capture the beauty of nature quite well, it never really achieves a level of Lean-esque glory or magnificence. Sure, it's pretty to look at, but what's the point?

The acting is also sorely lacking. Ettore Manni, who plays Mademoiselle's (and everyone else's) sexual interest, is just not very good. He often unleashes these boisterous laughs, and every time I cringed. It's not even a little bit convincing. Even the usually wonderful Moreau fails to impress here. Her performance just feels hollow. As she has proved in the past that she can be very good, I blame director Tony Richardson, who, unlike someone like François Truffaut or Louis Malle, clearly doesn't grasp what Moreau is capable of.

That's not to say Mademoiselle is a failure. There are several deeply disturbing moments, one in particular involving a rabbit. The film seems to be trying to say that all human beings can be monsters at times, and we take out our suppressed aggression on whatever innocence may be around us. Still, the film seems to lack a core of genuine emotional depth, and therefore, lacks resonance. It doesn't help that it tends to move along at a remarkably slow pace, which causes it to try the viewer's patience at times.

However, I would probably give Mademoiselle a mild recommendation, if for nothing besides the attractive visuals and the fact that it contains Jeanne Moreau.

MADEMOISELLE is an overly dark, lethargically-paced film about a rural French town beset by repeated tragedies: fires, floods and more. The locals suspect an Italian woodsman named Manou - because he's Italian, I guess - but in actuality it is a repressed old spinster called Mademoiselle (Jeanne Moreau) who is responsible. She is obsessed with Manou and out of her frustration is driven to horrible acts. Sure. Whatever.

This is a ridiculous story with no logic to it. No one ever suspects Mademoiselle, despite the fact that she's always on the scene, watching. Apparently French criminology was not very advanced in 1966. Mademoiselle is beloved by the town, even though she is always quite unpleasant. Manou's son knows it is she who is causing the destruction, but he never says anything to anyone about it, even though he loathes her. The "love" scene at the end, which feels like it takes up half the movie, will likely have you rolling on the floor with laughter.

If only being boring and absurd were its only crimes. Potential viewers will want to be aware that there are numerous scenes of real animal cruelty in the film. See Mademoiselle crush a quail's eggs in her hand and then thoughtfully place the remains back in the nest for the mother to find when she returns. See a young boy beat a rabbit to death by repeatedly swinging it against a woodpile because he's mad at his teacher. (Bonus shot! See the rabbit's bloody corpse!) And in the grand finale, Mademoiselle poisons the town's water supply. Lingering shots of dead and dying horses, cows and sheep ensue.

This is exactly the sort of movie that makes people think foreign films are dull and pretentious. Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity will find it abhorrent, and it is worthless on any other level as well.