Every Melanie Laurent-directed film is major cinematic event.
In _The Mad Women's Ball_ she ventures into 19th century
drama, acts in her own film for the first time since _The
Adopted_, and is reunited with the amazing Lou de Laage. It
is among my most anticipated films of recent years.

The protagonist Eugenie is a well-read and spirited young
lady in high society. Unfortunately she also speaks to
ghosts ("spirits"), and promptly gets sent to an infamous
asylum stocked with crazies, murderers, pickpockets, incest
victims, and other women France feels like silencing in the
1880s. It is critical that her ghost-whisperer does not come
off as pre-certified insane. Lou de Laage pitches her voice
extra low and her posture ultra-serious; her Eugenie makes
a visible effort to hold things together. When the spirits
or nurses attack, the actress gets to show off her stunning
range.

Melanie Laurent's button-down head nurse Genevieve is visually
and aurally Eugenie's older double. Laurent is just as
cathartic as her costar in the few emotional scenes she allows
herself. But most of the time she expresses herself through
the camera. Her sumptuous production design cues equate ladies
in high society with asylum inmates; both are show horses paraded
in front of prospective husbands and narcissistic shrinks. The
screenplay does not spare the female nurses aiding and abetting
the torture of their wards -- two of whom turn out to be their relatives.
In the end Eugenie tastes freedom, and Genevieve
attains a measure of redemption, by saving someone in a way she
has failed with her own sister. The film may be drenched in
Michel Foucault philosophy, but the ending has more than a
touch of _The Condemned of Altona_.

_The Mad Women's Ball_ is the most overtly feminist of
Laurent's films; indeed the widescreen compositions often
emphasize narrow, imprisoning doorways erected by the
patriarchy. But Laurent has set her ambition too high to
be pigeon-holed. She plainly aims for the company of the
greatest directors, and if you ask me, her visual panache
and challenging materials have already put her there.
There is the tragic coming-of-age story (_The Adopted_),
a more perverted coming-of-age tale with murder (_Breathe_),
a death-haunted neo-noir (_Galverston_), this one featuring
madness/imprisonment, and a sui generis stunner about a
mother abandoning her son -- and about death. (_Plonger_
truly belongs in the Young Poet Pantheon.) Without her
artistry these dark stories would have been unwatchable.
If there is a flaw in _Mad Women_, it is that the film is
too perfectly controlled, lacks the free-form risk-taking
in _Plonger_. But then, this *is* a prison film.

Laurent always switches color palettes, sometimes lighting
brightness, when cutting between scene to inject jolts of
adrenaline. She uses mostly natural lighting in _Mad
Women_, which floods in through far-field apertures like
in Dutch paintings. Her sentient camera moves so
evocatively: zooming in, out, dollying across (one early
scene reminds me of a signature Godard shot in _Nouvelle
Vague_), trailing the heroine, circling her like a guardian
angel. There is an audacious single-take action sequence
in _Galveston_ which pointedly invites comparison with
male directors' work. It was ignored by art-house critics;
if Alfonso Cuaron had shot that, critics would have been
gushing for decades. Why do they still condescend to
Laurent's (and other woman directors') technical mastery?
Are they less threatened by the bland work of Greta Gerwig
or Mia Hansen-Love they claim to embrace? No matter. I
hope Laurent knows that many moviegoers hold her in the
highest regard, and cannot wait for her next film to come
out.

(for A.)