Asylums are so endemic to horror and drama at this point that their inclusion borders on parody. They’re dark, decrepit places devoid of all life, home to nothing but monsters and stereotypical portrayals of the insane meant to disturb and frighten the “normal” members of society. It is a rare blessing then, that director/actor Mélanie Laurent’s THE MAD WOMEN’S BALL, adapted from the eponymous novel by Victoria Mas, strips the asylum of its cliched trappings and presents us with the raw, humanistic, and painful truth at the heart of the field of psychology’s history: the unabashed torture and torment of women.
While THE MAD WOMEN’S BALL is above all an ensemble story, its principle character is Eugénie Cléry (Lou de Laâge), a young woman in late 1800s Paris with a free spirit, an independent mind, and a quick tongue — qualities her father will not tolerate. Eugénie also has spectral encounters that leave her staring into space and gasping for breath. She is visited by the spirits of the dead. Alarmed by her visions, Eugénie’s family admits her to a neurological clinic in Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière overseen by Professor Jean-Martin Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet). The clinic is populated by women of all ages. Some are fleeing violence. Some, like Eugénie, are there by force. Most are given the dubious diagnosis of hysteria. Eugénie has been cloistered in a place where gaslighting, condescension, and abuse are the norm.
Like the novel it’s based on, the true horror of THE MAD WOMEN’S BALL lies in its inclusion of the truth. Professor Charcot was a very real man who conducted very real, cruel, and exploitative experiments on women in full view of a gawking crowd of men including Sigmund Freud and Edgar Degas to showcase his own “brilliance” in the emerging field of psychology. Patient Louise Augustine Gleizes, a role performed with heartbreaking sincerity and pathos by Lomane de Dietrich, was also a real historical figure who served as Charcot’s scientific muse after being abandoned in the asylum for the crime of being sexually abused by her mother’s lover at the age of 13. This place, the Pitié-Salpêtrière, still stands in Paris to this day as a fully functioning hospital in spite of the horrors once performed within it under the guise of medical study.
On a technical level, the piece shines with impeccable costuming and a sonorous soundtrack full of strings that pluck at your synapses as the brilliant ensemble of women of all ages and backgrounds almost dance across the screen at every moment as the male characters seem to cringe and shrink the more they assert themselves, their voices, and their rage at being treated as subhuman animals. It is, even in its darkest and most upsetting moments, a humanistic ballet within the larger narrative itself.
Laurent’s turn as jailer/nurse Geneviève is additionally praise worthy as the strict, hyper scientific foil to Eugénie’s fiery and spiritual nature. Throughout the film and her challenges within, we see her grapple unsteadily with her supposed role as an equal to the men of science around her as it becomes more and more obvious that she is closer in their eyes to the prisoners around her than to anything else, and how through the challenges posed to her by women like Eugénie and Louise, the welling of a spring of empathy inside of her seeks to trump all else and be, as one woman sings after a Christmas mass, a mother with light in her eyes.
It is through Geneviève’s growth and these women’s camaraderie and support in the pallid pit of despair that THE MAD WOMEN’S BALL seeks to remind us of the worth of the mentally ill, the blood payment of a field so many still stigmatize and take for granted, and how far we still have to go even two hundred years later.
THE MAD WOMEN’S BALL is screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released on Amazon Prime today, September 17.
Tags: Anny Danché, Benjamin Voisin, Cédric Khan, Christophe Montenez, Edgar Degas, Emmanuelle Bercot, France, Grégoire Bonnet, Lomane de Dietrich, Lou de Laâge, Louise Augustine Gleizes, Mélanie Laurent, Nicolas Karakatsanis, Paris, Sigmund Freud, Toronto International Film Festival, Victoria Mas
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