The Mad Woman’s Ball (Le Bal Des Folles), a French Amazon Original that premier in the Galas section at the Toronto International Film Festival, abides adapted, directed, and starred in by Mélanie Laurent. Lou de Laâge, who co-starred with Laurent in Breathe, also appears in this touching narrative of persecuted women in late-nineteenth-century France. Therefore based on Victoria Mas’ novel, combines real-life and fictional individuals in the frightening environment of a mental facility.
In a jealous rage, one pushed her husband into the Seine. Another refuses to say anything, others have been depressed for a long time. However, the others have gone insane. These are the patients of Pitié-Salpêtrière, a Parisian neurological clinic, and the women at the center of Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball, a slightly inconsistent but nevertheless compelling film.
Therefore, this new adaptation of Charles Perrault’s classic offers a feminist-friendly makeover. However, with the title heroine yearning for a Mélanie Laurent has established a successful parallel career as a director alongside her acting breakthrough as the feisty Shosanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi drama Inglourious Basterds. Nevertheless, now she pulls out all the stops with this highly watchable and well-made French belle époque costume drama. Furthermore, a vehement psychological melodrama of romance and the supernatural is set in a sinister neuro-psychiatric hospital where supposedly hysterical women are imprisoned and subjected to clinical surveillance and experimental treatment by frowning, frock-coated men. Accordingly, if you want to learn more about the movie, keep reading this blog till the finish.
Review Of The Mad Woman’s Ball
Laurent plays Geneviève, the head nurse at the hospital. However, which receives a new prisoner-patient one afternoon: Eugénie (Lou de Laâge), a beautiful, educated, and well-born woman who has been committed there by her wealthy, conformist father, François (Cédric Kahn).
Eugénie is horrified to be incarcerated in a madhouse, though, in a grim dormitory of women who have all, to varying degrees. However, been driven to a depressive or psychotic state by the very men who are supposed to look after them, and these men are themselves in a state of group dysfunction and sexual repression. Furthermore, in one case openly abusing one of the female patients, Louise: an excellent performance from Lomane de Dietrich.
Therefore, the story’s brilliance stems from the fact that Geneviève’s claim to be able to communicate with the dead. Moreover, something that a 21st-century spectator would consider crazy – is actually real. Consequently, geneviève begins to plan her escape from the hospital on the evening of its annual ball. Furthermore, the patients are permitted to attend in fancy dress as a special treat, by utilizing her superpower to divine the private agonies of the jailer-nurses.
However, this ball, and the numerous displays of logical control and madness-suppression that Laurent concocts in her film, have a Sadeian, or possibly Foucauldian, feel to them. This is especially evident in a particularly gruesome sequence in which the hospital’s director, Dr. Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet), hypnotizes Louise as part of a lecture attended by all of these other gentlemen and then coaxes her through a series of increasingly sexual gestures.
Trailer of The Mad Woman’s Ball
The release date, timing, and other facts of Movie
The Mad Women’s Ball has been on your mind all this time, and you’ve learned a lot. It should be exciting to see Eugénie transform into a cross between the Ghost Whisperer and Salpêtrière’s very own Andy Dufresne, but the weight of the miracle that binds them dulls their voices. Laurent wishes to resurrect Salpêtrière’s spirits but settles for the ghosts of their ghosts instead.
By the time “The Mad Women’s Ball” arrives at the high society party alluded to in the title — a garish spectacle at which members of the public mingle with Charcot’s dolled-up patients, making it scandalously easy to confuse the two — it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Laurent’s film has taken an unhelpfully brutal and bizarre path back to the ever-present truth that misogyny is a madness grumbling.
