Mademoiselle abbreviation Mlle, the French equivalent “Miss,” referring to an unmarried female. Etymologically it means “my (young) lady” (ma demoiselle).*
Unfortunately Jeanne Moreau isn't your ordinary Mademoiselle. She is an out of place, arrogant, sexually repressed, sadistic posh, who terrorize the villagers with her malicious plots.
The place is a small rural village in France. She is a teacher in the helmet school and a short hand typist in the police station. She has no friend or family, she walks alone around the village wearing high heels and urban clothes, the villagers care and respect her. Here and there her oddities ignored by the village heads as "problem of loneliness" they feel sorry about her. In the fields she makes a wreath for her head, after smelling the flowers she burns them with a cigarette !! carefully picks up the quail eggs from their nest and slowly crushes them in her hand !!!
Other stranger in the village is a traveling woodcutter Manou (Ettore Manni)
and his small entourage, his son Antonio and a fellow woodman Bruno. Manou is a strong, free spirited man who helps to villagers to put out the fires and saves the animals from drowning also and.. he conduct frisky small affairs with the village adulteress women.
In the classroom, Mademoiselle maliciously insults and punishes Antonio (Manou's son) in front of other kids, tells him that he dresses like Gypsies asking him to leave the class and not come back until dresses properly, she hopes to get his father attention but Antonio's own feelings about her stops him talking to his father.
Mademoiselle becomes increasingly jealous of Manou's little affairs with the other village women, she creates havoc in the village, flooding the carrels, burning, the barns, poison the village stock, the police investigation leads to nowhere. The ignorant villagers helplessly try to convince the police chief that the culprit is Manou, since he is a foreigner, he becomes an easy target.
In another deranged sequence of the film, Mademoiselle calmly tells the story of Gilles de Rais to the kids - a serial killer extraordinaire, French Marshal, accused with paedophobic activities, and sentenced to dead on 1440.
No collaboration from the police, the villagers have decided to take law in their own hands Mademoiselle and Manou meet on a desolate road in the woods, they spent the night under the moonlit woods and hay fields, in an erotic sequence Mademoiselle reveals her full courting repertoire, neck biting, booth liking, and wild howling, thunderstorm broke out. They make love, in the morning the love making continues. Later Manou tells her that he is leaving the village, she run away and returns to village, hysterical village crowd circles her, she appears like being raped; they want to know if " he " is the culprit? she replies: Yes.
Original screenplay written by Jean Genet in 1951. The subject is similar to other early Genet
scripts: Evil and isolation, and the Evil has an aesthetic value.
The picture is the first collaboration of Photographer David Watkin with British director Tony Richardson, Film shot in Le Rat, in the Correze, with entirely French crew. David Watkin remembers that Tony made the decision early on, not to use any music other than the actual sounds of nature .
Watkin introduces ultra-wide screen format, using anamorphic lenses. He suggests to Tony that all the movement in a scene should be carefully arranged inside the space, and camera itself would never move. Tony loves the idea, the result Millet like landscape painting.
Watkin's wide angle B & W photography stunningly captures the beauty of rural countryside, particularly suits the story line here, Moreaus triptych shots in front of the mirror reflects the Freudian side of psychologically disturbed femme-fatal and her poignantly beautiful face.
Dir:Tony Richardson
Story:Jean Genet
Script:Marguerite Duras
Photography: David Watkin
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