"I have always gone on to new places and undertakings, each different from those already familiar to me . Each time I’ve pushed off it has not been from the necessity or wish to get away but because the newer world holds the promise of a positive and glowing thing which I wanted to experience or create." ~  Tony Richardson

In 1966 with a film directed by Englishman Tony Richardson, written by Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, starring Jeanne Moreau and an Italian actor best known for Spaghetti Westerns, we may have reached peak International World Cinema. That the film is something of an overlooked and misunderstood masterwork, given the breadth of talent involved, then I guess that shouldn’t be surprising in the least. Richardson has recently cleaned up with his hit film Tom Jones, Duras had written a masterpiece in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Moreau was the toast of World Cinema so expectations should have been high. The ensuing dark hued fable left audiences cold and critics nonplussed.

Mademoiselle (Jeanne Moreau) is seen unlocking a gate holding back a dam as a congregation of villagers moves through the fields celebrating a Catholic ritual around the Virgin Mary. Soon they are called away to help the drowning animals in a flooded farm where the dam water has ended up. Mademoiselle turns up to watch the struggling villagers help the stricken animals, especially the well-built and handsome Manou (Ettore Manni) who does much of the dangerous work required. It transpires the villagers suspect the Italian of causing the flood, and other problems the town has been having. Mademoiselle next burns down a house and the same pattern happens with the police investigating Manou for the crime. Mademoiselle’s obsession with Manou ends up in a prolonged sexual encounter in the woods while the villagers are set on torches and pitchforks.

In this dark and fractured Jean Genet fairy tale the pretty princess is not what she seems, the village men are plain and dull, the woodcutter is a hunk and the village women lust after his rippling body in less than subtle ways. The setting may be contemporary mid-1960s in a small French village but the feeling is pure medieval. The enmities between the residents and the ‘foreigner’ Italians may have been exacerbated by the recent war but they feel ancient, entrenched and malevolent. When asked why the village men hate the handsome Italian wood cutter someone sardonically remarks, ‘Because they can smell him on their women.’ When small and mysterious disasters start to blight the hermetic community suspicion easily falls upon the Italians despite a lack of evidence.

Richardson builds the tension nicely as we get no explanation for Mademoiselle’s seemingly random secret damaging acts which even runs to crushing the eggs in a birds nest in a field to kill the hatchlings in a chilling moment of abject cruelty. The scenes of the drowning animals are truly vivid and wrenching, as are the disturbing scenes where Mademoiselle poisons the animals drinking water – modern viewers will look in vain for the disclaimer ‘no animals were harmed in the making of this picture.’ Jeanne Moreau’s cool demeanour in the face of the havoc she has wrought is one of the truly bracing elements in the composition and she is utterly spellbinding in her commitment to the role.

Mademoiselle works as a schoolteacher and bullies and belittles Bruno (Keith Skinner), the woodcutter’s young son in class and we’re unsure why. She reveals her hand somewhat when she tells the class a tale of Queen Isabella who inflicts suffering and creates chaos by burning and harming those who have crossed her and then she contrasts her evil with the ‘goodness’ of Jeanne d’Arc, as we realise the internal battle in Mademoiselle between good and evil. Richardson highlights her duplicity via several mirror shots. Religion is never far away from the centre of village life – the peasant women may visit church to light a candle, but gossip and lust are never far from their lips, much to the chagrin of the priest hearing confession. The church is mocked too, ‘Some are called to a life of suffering,’ the priest blurts to his housekeeper, an old peasant woman who responds, ‘You seem to forget that I make your bed!’ The church and the police both appear impotent to help the community against the onslaught of terror and piety is a perfect cover it seems in hiding lust, envy, jealousy and rage.

Mademoiselle works as a typist for the local police and when they speculate about the Italian’s involvement in the fire that she started, she defends him, ‘He was magnificent and risked his life. It was as if the fire was made for him.’ And of course it was. The story peels away when a flashback reveals the extent of her obsession and it turns out to be a tale as old as time. In the same way the cheap and lowly peasant women lust after the Italian stallion, so does Mademoiselle. Her dilemma is that she is seen as too prim and proper to consort with the itinerant woodsman so if the other women can bed him on the sly, she must devise other ways to get her satisfaction. She spies upon him he does his sweaty work and when he becomes aware of her intentions he teases her with a snake wrapped around his waist! Sacre bleu! This Eve is drawn into temptation and her fantasies are realised on a long night in the woods. Mademoiselle craves demeaning and animalistic sex and the scenes are intense and revealing, exposing the perversity deep inside her soul – but her perverse nature against the simple, earthy woodsman is a contrast in power and as in many a fairy tale there is death waiting.

The moral heart of the piece is represented by the ‘scapegoats’ – the Italians are the only ones who act with honesty and directness. Manou does not hide his sexuality and does his best to raise his son correctly, and in flashback we see a tender and caring Mademoiselle try to help Bruno initially, possibly as a way to get close to Manou. It transpires that the one person who knows Mademoiselle is the guilty party is Bruno, who at some level saw Mademoiselle as a mother substitute given his own had died young. The final shot sees him fully orphaned and alone with his suitcase waiting to leave the village, and yet he refused to give her up to the authorities, even as she receives a rousing send off as a beloved school mistress.

The film recalls the feelings of unease and strangeness that Luis Buñuel created with his masterful Diary of A Chambermaid with Jeanne Moreau. Genet and Duras also align this moral fable with Buñuel’s famous quote about the ‘immorality of bourgeois morality’ as they skewer or drown several sacred cows in the darkness of Mademoiselle’s sociopathy. Jeanne Moreau’s immersion in her character’s psychology is never less than convincing as she sails serenely through the wreckage of her wickedness, right until the very end as she leaves the woodcutter dead and the feted princess is given a regal send off by the none-the-wiser villagers. It’s a performance of great subtlety and art, and anyone who has seen Isabelle Huppert’s brilliant turn in Haneke’s brutal The Piano Teacher will see the tradition that film draws upon.

The film is gorgeously shot by cinematographer David Watkin, who’d previously worked with Richard Lester on the colourful pop-art romp Help!, starring The Beatles. Mademoiselle was shot in Black and White as a series of static widescreen compositions with no camera movement, zooms, dollies, dissolves or tracking shots at all. Lester commented after seeing it   - “Mademoiselle was the most beautiful black and white film I have ever, ever seen. They were using different stocks which had different flare factors and different qualities of the way the blacks and greys played for each scene. You were choosing stock to make something look great. It was very experimental.” The film is a masterpiece of tone and composition and Watkin would have a long career and win an Oscar for his superb work on Out of Africa in 1985.

Tony Richardson was a stellar talent, forever taking sideways chances when he could have settled into a lucrative mainstream career after the runaway success of Tom Jones. With Mademoiselle he’s almost willfully playing against that idea by offering a heroine with no redeeming features in a story where evil triumphs. He wanted Brando for the woodcutter role but settled on the straightforward choice of Ettore Manni, who did all that was required of him but the film belongs to Moreau who is incandescent in the role. Critics and the public didn’t know what to make of this subversive masterpiece in the year before the Summer of Love, and they certainly were not going to warm to it easily thereafter. Tony Richardson and Moreau had an affair during the filming and soon after he left wife Vanessa Redgrave for the French icon and the pair stayed together for some 5 years, but this memorable collaboration will last infinitely longer.