The Mad Women's Ball

Paris, 1885. Eugénie is the daughter of a wealthy family and says she hears the dead. Her father has her confined to the Salpêtrière hospital. Inside are hundreds of women, most of them not ill: women who defied a husband, unwanted daughters, women who talk too much. Once a year a ball is held and Parisian society comes to look at the patients. The subject is not mental illness but diagnosis as a means of confinement. Whether Eugénie really sees ghosts is not the film's question; the question is that a father's signature is enough. The form is enclosed and cold: wards, water treatment, demonstrations of hypnosis. The preparation for the ball is the most uncomfortable passage, with the women dressed in costume and readied for display. Everything behind it is real. At the Salpêtrière the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot presented patients to audiences in a lecture theatre, and the hospital's mid-Lent ball genuinely took place. The source is Victoria Mas' novel. Mélanie Laurent directs and plays the nurse Geneviève. Lou de Laâge plays Eugénie. The film was released on Amazon. Who it is for: viewers who like period drama and narratives about the confinement of women. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to watch institutional violence; the water treatment and forced intervention scenes are long and direct.