There seems to be a recurrent pattern in the film industry that whenever an actor, actress or director reach a plateau of critical and financial success, the critics come gunning for them. Deviation from their past triumphs or even experimentation are rarely tolerated and can usually lead to an almost gleeful putdown by the so-called intelligentsia and once loyal fan base. Such was the case with Tony Richardson’s 1966 feature, MADEMOISELLE starring Jeanne Moreau in the title role and based on a story by Jean Genet (he started the screenplay but it was finished by Marguerite Duras and allegedly four others including the director ). The hostile reception to it ran the gamut from “pretentious” to “grotesque” to “unintentionally funny” but it certainly wasn’t the first time Richardson had failed in their eyes – Sanctuary, his 1961 adaptation of the William Faulkner novel (admittedly, a terrible botch) and The Loved One (1965), based on Evelyn Waugh’s sharp satire of Southern California and the funeral industry, were famously savaged. Still, after Richardson’s glittering track record of Look Back in Anger (1958, winner of two BAFTA awards), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961 – winner of two BAFTA awards ), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Tom Jones (1963, winner of the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars of 1964), the critics were waiting to pounce again and MADEMOISELLE filled the bill.       

Set in a small, provincial French village where farming is the main occupation, the story focuses on the local school teacher (Jeanne Moreau) – there is only one in the town – and her growing obsession with an Italian laborer (Ettore Manni in a role originally intended for Marlon Brando) whose sexual dalliances with the local women has aroused the hatred and envy of the male villagers. We are given very little information about the seemingly staid and proper teacher’s past except that she used to live in Paris. One village gossip speculates to another that Mademoiselle (Moreau’s character is never identified by name) relocated so “she could be a big fish in a small pond.” Based on what we observe in the privacy of Mademoiselle’s apartment, a more accurate assessment would be – paraphrasing the famous sixties expression – “F*cked up in the city, F*cked up in the country.”      

Presenting herself as someone of impeccable character and good breeding to her community, she’s another story behind closed doors where her personal demons and obsessions are played out in carefully detailed rituals. Her closet serves as a shrine where she periodically worships her precisely arranged footwear and clothing, all of which takes on new significance when she dons much sexier attire for those special occasions of creating mayhem incognito in the village. After dark, she poisons the livestock, sets fire to barns and haystacks, and opens the floodgates to disastrous effect. Why is she doing this? We soon learn from flashbacks that Manou, the Italian laborer, is to blame for arousing her lust which has no other outlet in this backward, xenophobic hamlet. The fact that he also ignores her while preferring to dally with the local peasant women drives her to increasing acts of destruction until a fateful meeting with him in the forest evolves into a passionate night of lovemaking. But since this is based on a Jean Genet story we know nothing good can come of this union and prepare ourselves for the tragedy ahead. Meanwhile, no one is the wiser to the calculating Mademoiselle except one – Manou’s son, Bruno (Keith Skinner), who has witnessed her psychotic nature in private and in the classroom where she first favored him as a pupil and then began to verbally abuse him.      

 Almost every notable film critic of the time attacked MADEMOISELLE. In her review of 10:30 P.M. Summer, Pauline Kael referenced it: “Did you have daring ideas for sophisticated sexual dramas when you were in high school, and then, realizing how ludicrously lurid they were, laugh at yourself whenever you thought of them? Well, not everybody discarded those moldy-gaudy fantasies, as the Tony Richardson-Jean Genet collaboration on Mademoiselle demonstrated. And now there’s another of these movies to diddle by, 10:30 P.M. Summer directed by Jules Dassin out of Marguerite Duras – too preposterously purple to be successfully blue.”

Roger Ebert was no kinder: “The one who finds the most Freudian symbols in Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle wins the Norman Vincent Peale book of his choice. I’ll give you a few to get your list started: There are 19 shots of a lake. Lakes stand for women. Sometimes it is stormy, sometimes it is covered with raindrops, sometimes it is calm. Everytime you see Jeanne Moreau, she is like the lake. Stormy, covered with raindrops, calm….it is not the kind of movie that encourages mercy. It is murky, disjointed and unbearably tedious. The script by Jean Genet reads like something out of Evergreen Review by way of French pornography. Tony Richardson has never made a movie anything like this before…with “The Loved One,” Richardson came down with a bad case of trying too hard, and in Mademoiselle, there is no restraint at all. Still, Miss Moreau is as flawless in her lousy roles as her good ones.”        

Like Ebert, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times also took issue with what he deemed the film’s overt symbolism: “He [Richardson] dotes upon hackneyed Freudian symbols, such as pine trees being felled in the woods and a snake coiled around the waist of the wood chopper that glides down his arm and twines around his hand and the hand of the teacher when they finally come face to face. And he even employs the old chestnut of the moon going behind the clouds when the woman and her lover drop into the fall grass in the field.” Crowther also brings charges of misogyny against the film (which is like accusing Martin Scorsese of misandry in Raging Bull): “One can only suspect that Mr. Richardson and probably Mr. Genet were out to denigrate and castigate a woman as much as they could in this film. For there is absolutely no redeeming quality in the spectacularly vicious female here…All this, furthermore, is expounded…in a lurid, gravely melodramatic manner that is shocking from Mr. Richardson. As though he had never directed such a grandly humored picture as “Tom Jones,” he throws this one at the audience with grotesque solemnity.”  

Even more contemporary takes on it such as David Pirie’s capsule review in TimeOut mirrored similar sentiments: “…the whole thing suffers from Richardson’s terrible addiction to artistic overstatement…” Part of the problem may have stemmed from the fact that MADEMOISELLE was distributed in both English and French language versions and quite possibly the English version was the one most seen and was genuinely risible during the dialogue portions. I have only seen the French version though, but find MADEMOISELLE one of Richardson’s most impressive achievements. It is a work of pure cinema, a return in some ways to the visual artistry of the silent era in which the real story unfolds as a stream of potent images and dialogue is not needed. Yes, there is dialogue in MADEMOISELLE but it is sparse and telling. Much more important is the sound design of the film which foregoes a dramatic musical score in favor of natural sound effects – the wind blowing, rainfall, birds chirping, the sounds of axes hitting trees, feet tromping through fields and mud, the braying of sheep, the crackle and pop of a raging fire. The overall impression is one of human drama played out amid the vast indifference of nature itself. The tragedy on display has the epic sweep of opera and a similar theatrical extravagance on an emotional level. In some ways, you could say the film appropriates Moreau’s feverish fantasies and delusions as a directorial style, even to the point of running hot and cold with strict, exacting movements giving way to lyrical and liberating flights of fancy. For all of the critics who couldn’t see the forests for the trees – searching intently for symbolism in art films can be hazardous to your film viewing – MADEMOISELLE struck them as simply ludicrous. Hey, lighten up people, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.   

Taken on its own terms, Richardson’s creative visualization of Genet’s story and the spectacular widescreen cinematography by David Watkin (every frame of which could be hung in a gallery exhibit) tells a harsh but poetically rendered story of primeval emotions. Moreau is nothing less than dazzling and at the peak of her dramatic powers, breathing life and a genuine sense of emerging dementia into this pathetic, ruined human being. You can almost see her as a more dangerous extension of her Catherine from Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), except instead of destroying herself with her lover, she now just destroys the lover and moves on to inflect misery and death on her next victim. “Each man kills the thing he loves” is a recurring motif in the fiction of Genet – it’s certainly evident here – and would actually become a song (lyrics by Oscar Wilde), performed by Jeanne Moreau, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 film adaptation of Genet’s Querelle.

Tony Richardson – who fell in love with Moreau during the movie’s production, leading to a brief affair – had this final comment to say about MADEMOISELLE: “..the film was premiered at the Cannes Festival. Cannes, which is a flesh and critics market, was the worst place for it to open. On top of that, the French attacked me for tackling a “French” subject. It is a film I’m proud of, though at the time I was destroyed by the violence of its reception.” (For a fascinating and more detailed description of the making of MADEMOISELLE, read Tony Richardson’s autobiography, The Long-Distance Runner, which was published posthumously.)

MADEMOISELLE is still available in the 2002 MGM Home Entertainment DVD format which features the French language version with optional English, French and Spanish subtitles and the 2:35:1 widescreen ratio. Of course, it would be preferable to see it on the big screen but this is the next best option.