The Mad Women's Ball (dir. Melanie Laurent), 2021

Andre Brouillet was a French genre painter, choosing to depict events through realism in his portraiture during a time and place where expressionist art reigned supreme. His most famous work, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, is a large group portrait depicting famed neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot treating a female hysteria patient with a group of post-graduate onlookers. While The Mad Women’s Ball is not based on this painting the visual influence is striking: the color palette, the sharpness, and the framing. Director and screenwriter Melanie Laurent, perhaps better recognized through her prestigious acting career, has a close eye for detail and an even closer delicateness in how she approaches her characters and subject matters. As an actress, Laurent has worked with some of the most celebrated directors of the last decade: Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds (2009), Mike Mills in Beginners (2011), and Denis Villenevue in Enemy (2013). She still acts (in fact, her performance in the 2021 Netflix vehicle Oxygen remains one of the best female performances of the year), but recently has turned her focus to direction, a role in which she has proven herself equally capable. Her most recent directorial effort, The Mad Women’s Ball, also is her most ambitious and widely distributed. The portrait-like costume drama was only expected to reach a few arthouse cinemas outside of France, but instead was picked up by Amazon Studios for distribution across the globe in the wake of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. While Amazon has not quite invested the advertising money it had for the critically-panned Cinderella remake, perhaps a streaming service ultimately was the best distribution for a film like The Mad Women’s Ball.

Adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name, the historical and supernatural drama follows women misdiagnosed as hysterics and imprisoned at Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital in 1885. The title of the film was an annual event held by Dr. Charcot, where the women of Salpêtrière were allowed to dress up and granted a temporary sense of normalcy. However, the true purpose of the ball was far more ominous: these women were merely a display for the upper echelons of Parisian society to ogle at over champagne and other finery. Many of the women institutionalized as hysterics were victims of rape, abuse, or merely deemed too rebellious. Eugenie Clery (Laurent muse Lou de Laage) is of the latter category. A well-heeled young Parisian, Eugenie is a familiar heroine in that her intellect and independence are viewed as threatening rather than quality characteristics. Eugenie and her brother, Theophile, are expected to be married off to similarly well-off families with good societal standing. The close siblings, however, suffer from what would have been considered mental illness at the time: Eugenie hears voices and Theophile is a homosexual. Whereas Theophile has resigned to live his true life in secrecy, already courting a young society woman, Eugenie openly accepts the voices she hears which she recognizes as spirits of the dead. The Clery family betrays Eugenie and has her committed to the Salpêtrière asylum, officially under the care of Dr. Charcot until she is deemed sane. While the character of Eugenie may sound cliche or better suited as a Young Adult heroine, Laurent has scripted and directed a surprising sense of supernatural realism akin to the work of Guillermo del Toro. We as the audience accept that Eugenie can hear the dead, though we never hear or see them ourselves, and never once find her claim a basis for institutionalization, nor does this supernatural element come across as an immature or rudimentary plot device.

At Salpêtrière, Eugenie is faced with Head Nurse Genevieve Gleizes (Laurent), seemingly cold and manufactured, with a latent air of misogyny. Genevieve works at the side of Dr. Charcot, likely obtaining a role beyond a woman’s reach due to the medical career and influence of her father. She has been conditioned by both men who control her livelihood to see these patients as mere tools for male scientific research rather than human beings trapped in a horrific cycle. As Eugenie refuses to recant her claims of speaking to spirits, undergoing cruel experimental punishments such as hydrotherapy, Genevieve visually softens amidst the dissent. At first disturbed by voices Eugenie can hear, when Genevieve’s deceased sister Blandine attempts to communicate, Genevieve finds her faith in science and the permanence of death wane. Further, her scope is widened to see beyond the male narrative. Genevieve clearly sees the women in her care and their conditions, whose mental states are influenced greatly by the abuse they undergo at Salpêtrière. The institutionalized women supporting the narratives of Eugenie and Genevieve easily could become stereotyped by their flaws: Louise, a confidant of Eugenie who was institutionalized after sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle and experiences continued abuse at the hands of a postgraduate student; Therese, an elderly women who pushed her husband into the Seine River decades prior; Marguerite, a young woman suffering from understandable bouts of rage; and, Camille who remains mute by choice save for moments where she spontaneously breaks out into song. Yet, while the story of each woman is limited, they equally are afforded depth and persona which makes their collective imprisonment and its mental impacts all the more devastating.

Despite their first moments on opposing sides of a clinical desk, the stories of Genevieve and Eugenie intertwine closely as we notice the limits of freedom a single, working woman like Genevieve was afforded at the time. While Genevieve can enjoy lunches with her father and brief sparks of life outside the walls of Salpêtrière, she is confined by her own gender and her talents limited by the men for whom she works. In character, Laurent is able to express a moving, non-verbal sense of empathy for the women of Salpêtrière. Further, in her relationship with Eugenie she finds freedom in thought, belief, in expression that once was at the mercy of male opinion. In return for contact with the spirit of her sister, Genevieve affords Eugenie a promise: to help her leave Salpêtrière at the titular mad women’s ball, putting her own livelihood at risk.

Laurent has crafted a film which, on paper, feels utterly familiar, drab, and perhaps even absurd. For a film which hovers between psychodrama and melodrama, Laurent has a deep understanding of the human form, ethical negotiations, and the duality of rational and irrational states which enables the film to subvert often negative expectations of the genres. Worth noting is her technical team, particularly the world-class editing and subtle cinematography, which provide subtly fluid movements up until the chaotic final act, where the camera cleanly flows between a number of divergent scenes concurrently. The Mad Women’s Ball may have been lost if released to theaters, with the uncertainty of how to advertise such a story, so perhaps it is a positive turn that the film found distribution through Amazon where subscribers may feel inclined to give it a try indiscriminately through subscriber accounts. Even more, I hope this film bolsters the talent and demand of Laurent as actress, screenwriter, and director. After all, I would love to see her filmmaking continue to tackle historical fiction through a sort of magical realism.

Rating: 8/10

The Mad Women's Ball is available to stream on AmazonPrime.