Synopsis
The Mad Women's Ball (Le Bal des folles, 2021) is a French historical drama-thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by and starring Mélanie Laurent. Late nineteenth-century Paris: Eugénie, a young woman from a privileged household, sees and hears the dead. Her family has her committed to the Salpêtrière asylum, where the celebrated neurologist Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot runs his famous — and deeply theatrical — clinical demonstrations.
Inside, patients are sorted, exhibited, and managed. Eugénie finds an unlikely ally in nurse Geneviève, played by Laurent herself. Lou de Laâge carries the central role with composure rather than hysteria, which is exactly the right choice. The film is adapted from Victoria Mas's novel of the same name.
What lingers is the film's core argument: that "madness" was often just a label applied to inconvenient women by comfortable men. Laurent stages that anger with restraint, and the restraint makes it land harder. Stream The Mad Women's Ball (2021) online on iFILM.
Starring
Comments 0