Mademoiselle

As David Lynch might say, this is a story about what happens when a man gets involved with the wrong type of woman, or, rather, about how a man who too greatly excites feminine desire can expect the wrath of the crowd. In other words, it is about the connections between sexual repression and the drives unbound, and how these symptoms relate to pathologies both individual and collective.

It seems that this film may at the time of its release have been a victim of the eternally superficial accusation of “pretentiousness”, which might itself be taken as evidence of critics being uncomfortable with the onscreen depiction of female sexuality, and in this way as, ironically, vindication of the film’s theme and message. Even much later on, Maltin (2014) will describe it as “ponderous, sometimes hilariously pretentious” and as a “woeful foray into arty s&m”, while Shipman (1986) will describe it as being made “for an intelligentsia audience which seems to exist only in [the director’s] imagination”, featuring “ritualistic rutting between the furrows [that] is not akin to any known human activity” (p. 569). Neither Halliwell nor Kael ever mention the film, as far as I can tell.

One can’t help but suspect that some kind of psychoanalytic anthropological fieldwork exploring the world and psychology of film critics would reveal this tendency towards repression and uncomfortableness concerning the representation of women as sexual beings with their own physiology and pathology of desire. To this viewer’s eyes, the stark photography, fixed camera, frequent shots in which figures appear in only a small portion of the image (as if they are only minor elements in some larger cosmic spiralling), lack of music and singleminded focus all add up to an effectively sexy nightmare. From what I understand, in 1973 Patti Smith very much appreciated it, and may even have been, who knows, familiar with some not-unrelated human activities, Shipman’s claims notwithstanding – see the quotation from Smith in Vägan (2014).