425 - Mademoiselle, France, 1966. Dir. Tony Richardson.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

425 - Mademoiselle, France, 1966.  Dir. Tony Richardson.

Life is good in this French provincial town.

Unless you are Italian.

Or unless you are targeted by the person who is mysteriously wreaking havoc through flood and fire and poisoning.

Manou and his son Bruno have settled here looking for a place to call home.  Manou is hard-working.  He is a lumberjack.  And he has the physique to show for it.

The women love it.  They love him.  They love to look at him.  To talk about him.  To dream about him.

The men hate it.  They cannot keep their women from looking at Manou and dreaming about him.

So when the first barn burns, Manou makes a good scapegoat.  He is the foreigner.  The outsider.  He must have started the fire.  He just happens to be the quickest and the bravest to rescue others.

The second barn burns.  And then the third.  And the town grows restless.  We need to do something about this man.

We, however, know more than they do.  We see the town's schoolteacher, Mademoiselle, as she opens the sluice gate, causing the floodwaters to roar.

This is the woman who picks up eggs out of a birds' nest and crushes them for no apparent reason other than her own perverse pleasure, depositing the remains back in the nest.

The farmer races to ring the church bell to alert the villagers.  The Catholics abandon their procession to come running and help.  Once again, an intentional catastrophe.

Manou, as always, races to help.  When the locals gossip about his culpability, Mademoiselle herself, who has come with the rest of the town, observes that he risks his life to save others.

Mademoiselle is an austere teacher.  She comes from Paris.  She dresses elegantly.  She maintains strict discipline.  She seems to have singled out Manou's son Bruno for particularly severe treatment.

She makes him stand in the corner.  She ridicules him for wearing shorts.  For having dirty knees.  For wearing long pants.  For having dirty feet.  He is a good kid with a good relationship with his hard-working father, but he can do no right in her eyes.

Mademoiselle sets fire to another barn, and this time Bruno finds the original paper that she lit to ignite it.  He suspects her.

She poisons the water.  The livestock die.

What motivates Mademoiselle's behavior?  She is a wicked woman.

For one, she seems to bear in her bosom some pent-up desire for Manou that she cannot satisfy.  He has not given her attention.  When she walks into the woods to spy on him, he does his job.  When he spots her, he laughs at the presence of a woman.  He is a good-natured, happy man.  She seems to resent his lack of awareness.  She seems to take pleasure in punishing him in the eyes of the public.

Will Mademoiselle win Manou's affection?

Will Manou defend his reputation?

Will Bruno put together the pieces?

Will the town discover the true assailant?

Or will an innocent man be sacrificed on the altar of confusion?

Tony Richardson was a British director of the British New Wave.  So it was a departure for him to make a French psychological drama based on a character study.

He films Mademoiselle in crisp black & white with stretches of narrative devoid of dialogue.  He immerses us in landscape and gives the film space to breathe and to develop over time.  We are just as caught up in the natural world around us as we are the story itself.  He further edits the scenes in a staccato kind of rhythm with plenty of counterpoint.  A close-up of tree bark.  An extreme wide shot of the countryside.  A high angle on livestock.  The camera looking through the tall grass.  The sun peaking over the trees.  The moon coming out from behind the clouds.  The waters making their way through the streets.  The lovers standing.  Then lying.  Then sitting up.  Then lying.  Then standing.  Then lying.  Then walking.  Together.  Apart.  Coming together.  Parting.

Jeanne Moreau plays Mademoiselle.  As the schoolteacher she is sharp and precise.  As a Parisian she is elegant and charming.  As a woman of desire she sits on a pressure cooker of concealed sensuality.  As a covert miscreant she is callous and cold.  She is a complicated and enigmatic character.

Jeanne Moreau had a long and illustrious career, playing in many kinds of roles and working with many of the great artistic directors.  She lived until last year and continued working until two years prior.

We have seen her in Louis Malle's debut feature Elevator to the Gallows (1958), in a cameo in Francois Truffaut's debut The 400 Blows (1959), in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961), in Orson Welles' Falstaff story Chimes at Midnight (1965), in Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Feminin (1966), and in Francois Truffaut's revenge drama The Bride Wore Black (1968).

She has also appeared, among many other films, alongside Jean Gabin in the currently out-of-print Jacques Becker crime drama Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954). in Francois Truffaut's classic romantic drama Jules and Jim (1962), in Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial (1962), in Luis Bunuel's crime drama Diary of a Chambermaid (1962), in Elia Kazan's F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation The Last Tycoon (1976), in Michelangelo Antonioni's romance Beyond the Clouds (1995), and as Claire Danes' grandmother Nana in Billy Hopkins' film version of the Wendy Kesselman play I Love You, I Love You Not (1996).

In the thirteenth episode of the ninth year of Inside the Actors Studio (2003), James Lipton is interviewing John Travolta, and he surprises him with a special guest in the audience, Jeanne Moreau.  Travolta knows her and loves her, and he honors her presence.

The film was nominated for a Palme d'Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.  It was nominated for a BAFTA for cinematography and it won for costumes.

With a teacher like Mademoiselle, we recommend that you homeschool.

Or move to another town.