Review: The Mad Women’s Ball Repackages Familiar Insights as Revelations

Adapted from Victoria Mas’s novel of the same name, Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball tells the story of what happens to a bright young woman, Eugénie (Lou de Laâge), who chafes against the social order of Paris in the 1880s. In one scene, Eugénie gets into trouble for comparing the process by which women like her make their “societal debut” as marriageable persons to a horse being shown at the market. Which makes a later scene set at La Salpétrière Hospital feel all the more bitter and perverse. Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet), head of the neurology clinic where “hysteric” women like Eugénie are interred, trots out a patient (Lomane de Dietrich) as if she were an animal, demonstrating her affliction through hypnosis until she falls to the ground in an apparent seizure.

Eugénie is institutionalized, at least officially, because she believes that she can commune with spirits, but the film refrains from validating her perspective in this regard, never depicting the ghosts that she ostensibly sees and hears. We’re not predisposed to believe Eugénie, but we also never see any kind of last straw that causes her family to have her committed—no example of truly disruptive or harmful behavior. Even in the unflattering context of watching her react to empty space, we can easily observe her harmlessness and how her apparent condition functions as a handy reason for her father, François Cléry (Cédric Kahn), to deal with the nuisance of her non-conformity. In this way, The Mad Women’s Ball is nothing if not sensitive to the place of women in the late-19th-century society.

At the clinic, experiments are conducted on the women at the behest of doctors. Alongside basic caregiving, procedures like locking someone in a tub of ice fall to nurses who carry out the routines with near-total detachment. One such nurse, Geneviève (Laurent), is mourning her sister’s death, and Eugénie ingratiates herself to the woman and brings her some measure of closure, revealing details about her private life that point to Eugénie actually being able to communicate with spirits. At this point, it becomes apparent that the film is as interested in conveying the tragedy of Eugénie’s dubious institutionalization as it is in the way that women like Geneviève are swept up into a larger, oppressive cycle of compliance that’s here halted only by apparent evidence of the supernatural. And even then, it’s only briefly halted.

We’re never told how the procedures regularly carried out by the nurses are supposed to work; the “treatments” are absurd at best, and cruel at worst. But if the depiction of the clinic as a dehumanizing place is convincing, it also doesn’t feel, like its understanding that mental illness in the 19th century was horrifically misunderstood and weaponized against women, particularly incisive. A better sense of the characters might have overcome this general obviousness, but The Mad Women’s Ball exhibits a problem common to adaptations of books, where the attempt to focus on the main story loses the surrounding texture, leaving side characters and subplots to dangle around the edges of the protagonist’s struggle.

With those peripheral threads so diminished here, long stretches of The Mad Women’s Ball are near-indistinguishable from your average prison film, featuring as it does a sadistic overseer, the bad thing that happens to the main character’s pal, the solitary confinement, and the attempted escape. Even the pivotal relationship between Eugénie and Geneviève feels half-sketched, despite prompting one of the film’s most memorable scenes: of the camera circling Eugénie in close-up as she tries to communicate with spirits while the nurse perpetually looms in the background. Handsomely constructed though The Mad Women’s Ball may be, the film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Laurent to hang her directorial panache.