‘The Mad Women’s Ball’: Mélanie Laurent’s Latest Drama Is An Uncompromising Defense Of Female Bodily Autonomy [TIFF Review]

During my first year of film school, my teacher would assign a great task to all her students during a post-production and sound course. The assignment was a unique redubbing exercise, stripping the audio and initial sound mix from pre-existing film scenes.

Mounia Akl’s feature debut, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” comfortably occupies a space between “Beasts of the Southern Wild” from “Honeyland”: Each movie deals with environmental dilemmas, ranging from climate change to the loss of biodiversity, but in their own ways and their own approaches. “Honeyland” takes the narrative nonfiction tack, chronicling the travails of a Macedonian beekeeper; “Beasts of the Southern Wild” grieves Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath with magical realism.

Guns, gold bars, drug lords, military coups, folk heroes, tall tales, and ghost stories. Is there a 2021 film that gives more bang for the buck than Jean Luc Herbulot’s superb “Saloum”? This is not a case of “too much” movie, where the director and screenwriter thoughtlessly stuff as many ingredients into the pot as they can and hope the concoction doesn’t boil over.

We casually throw the word “icon” around with such abandon these days that it almost feels like we need a new, more potent idiom to describe those who actually fit the bill. But until we get that term, let’s say that Sigourney Weaver is an absolute icon and leave it at that — a brilliant actor equally adept at drama, action, and comedy, a three-time Academy Award nominee (two of them in the same year), the kind of screen presence who lifts just about anything she’s in.

Julia Ducournau the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Audrey Diwan just won the Golden Lion in Venice.Laurent: When we gave the prize to Julia for “Titane,” she came on stage, she was very moved. She made a beautiful speech.

What was once such a good, healthy relationship has turned so sour it’s puckered into nothing.

Comfortable in his newly found friendship, Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrete), a teenager from Mexico City who traveled to Chihuahua’s northern state to reclaim his father’s remains, pretends to be upset and explains he’s decided to return home. He laughs several seconds later, tricking Mario (Hernán Mendoza), his boss and impromptu life mentor.

Remember the promising breakout feature, “The Milk of Sorrow,” from Peruvian director Claudia Llosa? She also helmed the very strong “Aloft” with Jennifer Connelly in 2014. Well, it’s been seven years since her last feature, but Netflix is backing her latest, “Fever Dream,” based on the best-selling novel by Samanta Schewblin.

Cult classics generally don’t happen on purpose and they usually don’t happen in just 10 days, either.

Mélanie Laurent cast an assortment of different actresses with disabilities for her new film “The Mad Women’s Ball,” which is set inside a 19th century French psychiatric institution. Because the film is about how women in this time were frequently mistreated and misunderstood, she wanted to make sure her movie could celebrate these women.

Actress, writer and director Mélanie Laurent brings her adapted screenplay “The Mad Women’s Ball”, based on the novel Le bal des folles by Victoria Mas, to the Toronto International Film Festival.

TORONTO – There’s something intoxicating when an established filmmaker unexpectedly challenges themselves creatively with a new project. Acclaimed writer and director Terence Davies does just that with his latest endeavor, “Benediction,” a biopic about the life of the celebrated poet Sigfried Sassoon that debuted at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival this past weekend.

Reuniting with “St. Vincent,” director Theodore Melfi, Melissa McCarthy, and Chris O’Dowd play a married couple on the rocks after the unexpected loss of their baby tears them apart.

In writer-director Stephen Karam’s feature debut, the dark horror-comedy “The Humans,” it’s not so much a bump in the night or the creak in the door that can rupture an untapped fear. Those are merely the externalized notes that grant music to the ever-present existential dread.

Mélanie Laurent adapted, directs and stars in The Mad Women’s Ball (Le Bal Des Folles), a French Amazon Original that premiered in the Galas section at the Toronto International Film Festival. Lou de Laâge, who worked with Laurent in Breathe, co-stars in the moving story of oppressed women in late 19th century France. Based on the novel by Victoria Mas, it blends real-life characters with fictional ones in the disturbing setting of a mental institution.

According to the basic tenets of Christian scripture, all god’s creatures are worthy of judgment-free love. And while the hypocrisy of those words is rarely interrogated in “The Eyes Of Tammy Faye” — the bible belt preachers and communities presented in the film often fail to practice what they preach and are never forced to examine their own accumulation of wealth — these parts of the bible are really not the film’s concern.

In writer-director Stephen Karam’s feature debut, the dark horror-comedy “The Humans,” it’s not so much a bump in the night or the creak in the door that can rupture an untapped fear. Those are merely the externalized notes that grant music to the ever-present existential dread.

Everyone knows someone like Rebeca Huntt. A born-and-bred New Yorker, she came of age in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, her family’s pride and joy.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentMelanie Laurent, one of France’s most acclaimed actors-turned-filmmakers, has been having a banner 2021, headlining Alexandre Aja’s hit Netflix movie “Oxygene,” sitting on Spike Lee’s Cannes jury, and world premiering her sixth directorial effort “The Mad Women’s Ball” at Toronto.