French filmmaker Mélanie Laurent delivered a formidable film to TIFF, in deep resonance with contemporary reflections on misogyny throughout history. It is taken from the book of the same name by Victoria Mas, published in 2019, widely awarded in France. The fool’s ball evokes beyond his fiction the odious treatments reserved for women considered hysterical or unbalanced at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in the 19th centurye century under the leadership of the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. He used these patients as guinea pigs for authoritative experiments. Each year, he also organized a masked ball there, where the bourgeoisie of the capital could rub shoulders with these women, exhibited like fairground animals.
On sumptuous images by Nicolas Karakatsanis, we follow the trajectory of Eugenie (Lou de Laage, luminous), a young girl from a good family, sensitive, intelligent endowed with a gift of clairvoyance which allows her to communicate with spirits. It is bad for her, because her father has her interned at the Salpêtrière. Alongside the other unfortunate women, also in contact with Geneviève, the doctor’s assistant (played by Mélanie Laurent), her passage through these walls is a way of the cross: isolation dungeon, ice baths, insults of Doctor Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet ) who sees her as a dangerous disruptor. It was during the great costume ball that his destiny changed.
The filmmaker, sometimes influenced here by the aesthetics of Portrait of the girl on fire by Céline Sciamma (less brilliant), a leading French actress, has been making her own films since 2008 (Adopted, Breathe, Galveston, etc.). The fool’s ball (broadcast on Amazon) is his best feature film, the most technically completed too. We feel it invested from top to bottom, carried by the lyricism, the spiritualism, the feminism of its subject. This touching and revolting work, which uses sets and costumes without collapsing under the clichés of the period production, offers a skilful staging, ample camera movements under the light of the outside and the chiaroscuro of the hospital. This film, which shows the fate of independent female spirits under the triumphant patriarchy, sounds like a manifesto.
With the character of Geneviève, initially off-putting, evolving towards the gift of herself, Mélanie Laurent plays a real role of maturity. The cast, which also includes Emmanuelle Bercot as a nurse full of humanity, is impressive. Several key scenes, including Agathe’s hospitalization, the barbaric hypnosis of one of her companions, the costume ball that is both baroque and pathetic, are overwhelming.
Alanis Morissette and the roller coaster
Also seen at TIFF, the documentary Jagged, Alison Klayman, on Canadian pop singer Alanis Morissette. The classic style of the film (archival documents, interviews, extracts from shows and music videos) does not prevent this portrait of a woman artist from touching. Because the singer from Ottawa, who rose to world fame with her album Jagged Little Pill at 21 in the mid-1990s, was also a committed woman, feminist, model of several American musicians who succeeded her.
The testimonies of her friends and musicians, the revelations of the singer-songwriter who knew sexism and abuse, who lived, lost, regained glory over the years, appears like a kind of fable about the ups and downs of Fame. Also on the pressing need to create in order to get out of oneself, in the constant concern of renewing oneself.
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