Mark Reviews Movies: THE MAD WOMEN'S BALL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

Co-writer/director Mélanie Laurent's The Mad Women's Ball attempts too much and leaves us with little. The story, based partially on fact and wholly on Victoria Mas' novel of the same name, primarily involves the real Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which was at the forefront of neuropsychiatric study in the late 1800s and also an unofficial prison for women deemed to suffer from "hysteria." The title refers to an annual gala, where the people of Paris could come into close proximity with these women and see "madness" firsthand.

One point of the screenplay by Laurent and Christophe Deslandes, of course, is how these women are exploited for questionable research, torturous "treatments," and, with that ball, public humiliation. The movie follows a woman from a well-to-do family, who is wrongly committed to the asylum, and the hospital's head nurse, who gradually realizes this fact and decides to help. On its face, the plot here is that simple and seemingly trying to raise appropriate outrage of a reality—how people with mental illnesses or those falsely diagnosed with some real or imagined form of it were treated—that we have known for some time now.

The movie offers nothing particularly new, in other words. That, though, isn't necessarily a strike against it, especially given the consideration and horror with which Laurent portrays these women and the terrible ways in which they are physically abused, mentally tormented, and made to be even worse off than they were upon arriving at the asylum. If the story were simply that, it might have succeeded to some degree, as familiar and predictable as the material may have been and, for the most part, remains here.

There are few complications to achieving that goal within this particular story, though—too many characters whose stories are overshadowed or abandoned, two central characters who are defined almost exclusively by their respective circumstances, a key plot point that involves the supernatural and unnecessarily complicates our protagonist's unjust suffering. Indeed, the movie's embrace of a spiritual element—as in of ghosts, not religion—more or less undercuts the dreadful practices and terrible treatment of every other character here. A woman who claims to and actually can see ghosts isn't ill, obviously, but in separating her from everyone else as special and genuine, what does that say of the confinement and treatment of the other women in the facility?

The spirit-seer is Eugénie (Lou de Laâge), who wants to live life on her own terms (An opening scene sees her attending the large funeral for Victor Hugo, establishing her rebellious streak and the year as 1885). Her strict father (played by Cédric Kahn), though, wants Eugénie to be obedient and sheltered, so that she may marry a man of means. Eugénie's brother Théophile (Benjamin Voisin), who has a forgotten secret of his own, is more lenient, and after the brother drops her off at a café, Eugénie is gifted a book about spirits. Reading it gives her an explanation for why she has heard voices for most of her life.

Upon discovering Eugénie's secret, her father has her committed to Salpêtrière, where she will stay until the hospital's head doctor Jean-Martin Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet), one of a couple real-life figures in the story, determines she can be released. The hospital's head nurse Geneviève (Laurent) knows that rarely, if ever, happens.

The question is less if Eugénie's claims of being able to speak to the spirits of the dead is real and more if Geneviève will come to accept it as real. The authenticity of Eugénie's ability is established early and repeatedly, as the young woman is able to find lost things, have knowledge that she otherwise couldn't, and know things that are happening outside of the asylum walls as they happen. It's a strange, roundabout, and overly convoluted way to prove that this woman—who endures forced drugging, chilling baths, a long stretch of solitary confinement, and other tortures—isn't mentally ill, but she is inconvenient in the eyes of her father, society at large, and the hospital's goals.

While Eugénie tries to prove her sincerity to the nurse, we also meet several other women being held in the asylum. The implication, perhaps, is that, if Eugénie is wrongly confined, some of these other women must be, as well—and none of them deserve this treatment, regardless. That idea comes through in broad terms, especially through the character of Louise (Lomane de Dietrich), whose hypnosis "therapy" is making her seizures worse and who is being romantically and sexually manipulated by a young doctor (played by Christophe Montenez). Most of these characters and stories, though, matter little, leaving us only with Eugénie, whose supernatural gifts make her less representational of the reality of the asylum—and reality in general, for that matter.

The foundation of this story, then, feels more like a gimmicky melodrama, putting an artificial barrier in front of questions and examinations of medical ethics and society's discarding of "inconvenient" women. The Mad Women's Ball muddles a pretty simple message with too much that's extraneous or questionable.

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