Word: moreau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mademoiselle is an exquisitely photographed flop in which three flamboyant talents compound each other's mistakes. Trying an English-language drama overladen with artsy Continental flavor, Director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) miscasts Jeanne Moreau, an actress far too frost-free to catch the temper of a frustrated spinster. She brings every subconscious drive boiling to the surface, and her roaring heterosexual readiness makes a parody of the screenplay by France's poet of perversion, Jean Genet...
...provincial school teacher, Moreau expresses her lust for an Italian woodcutter (Ettore Manni) by scourging the countryside with fire, flood and poison. Moviegoers may take it or leave it; but those who stick around will probably want to amuse themselves by counting phallic symbols. Snakes and falling timber abound, and Mademoiselle's metaphor for the act of love is an ax blade buried in lumber. Xenophobia, pyromania and sundry aberrations are touched upon, while Genet catalogues the destructive power of Woman. On the night before the woodsman is beaten to death by the villagers who suspect...
Occasionally, Director Richardson entraps a darkly beautiful image, filling Moreau's unfathomable eyes with licks of reflected flame in a monstrous closeup. More often, Mademoiselle's effects are merely outlandish, and the film creates an overall impression of rich resources gone smashingly to waste...
...JEANNE MOREAU (Pathe). On this older record (Grand Prix International du Disque 1964-but still in print), Jeanne, with her clear, childlike voice, sings the folksy songs of Cyrus Bassiak...
Animal Butchery. Jean Genet, France's existential sensualist, joined forces with Director Tony Richardson and Actress Jeanne Moreau, a festival favorite, to produce Mademoiselle, a story of Sodom in the suburbs. It should have been a festival favorite too; instead it got soundly, roundly booed, possibly because Moreau overworks her villainy. The film is rife with animal butchery and exotic sexuality. Sniffed one critic: "Maybe we didn't know that licking the nose of a gentleman in the moonlight constituted eroticism . . . but did we really have to know...