In a departure from our usual focus on old white men we dedicate this article to the Mademoiselle featured in the eponymous film starring Jeanne Moreau and scripted by no less than Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet. The main character displays the sort of female dandyism that is decidedly deadlier than the male.
“I rebel; therefore I exist.” Albert Camus
1966. Sexual Intercourse itself was only three years old (according to Philip Larkin) and the mainstream was hardly ready for a respectable schoolteacher who enacts all the sadomasochism implicit in her taut respectability.
Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras co-wrote the script and both their input is cleary visible, black on white as it were and in indelible images. Desire, the ecstasy of love and the even greater ecstasy of betrayal. Saint Genet didn’t want Jeanne Moreau cast as Mademoiselle apparently, but it is impossible now to imagine anybody else in the role. It’s like she’s finishing what she started in Bunuel’s earlier Diary of a Chambermaid, only now she’s not putting on the kinky boots to get some guy off, she’s putting them on to get off herself and there is a lot more to it than the boots. Like setting villages on fire and poisoning wells and misdirecting floods. But it would be too simplistic an interpretation to say that all that water is just her pent-up juices. Mademoiselle is a non-believer caught up in other people’s belief systems. She is a complex city girl amongst simple country folk. She is a prim and proper schoolmarm in twin-sets without pearls and proper length skirts behind convent walls and all lace and high lacing boots when she’s at home and when she’s up to no good. And that’s not a double life, it’s just two sides of the same coin. Because when you’re not in a belief system, you feel the indifference (sweet) of the universe and the absurdity of everything that happens and doesn’t happen. And sometimes it is not enough to accept this absurdity, sometimes you just have to add to it a little. Oh and there is also this foreign worker who has all the goodness and hon y soit qui mal y pense of a force of nature, and he’s fucked all the half-way fuckable chicks in the village and he’s not liked very well by their husbands and by the less fuckable chicks and Mademoiselle, who is too unapproachable but very fuckable needs to get his attention somehow. Like indirectly.
In the end she does, just strolling through the woods and as Patti Smith, who was really quite young at the time the film came out and had just had to give up a child for adoption which is not easy for anybody, put it: “Like they fucked for two days in thunder and lightning, and the sky was just totally opening up, the fields were on fire, the whole world was going berserk – and they were just fucking right through it all. There was racial strife and poverty and people killing each other and everything was in flames, and they were still fucking… And then she sold this guy down the river.”
Well, yes and that’s where the full ecstasy comes home because you don’t only have to fuck with the brains of the people who get you entirely wrong you also have to kill those you love. Mademoiselle comes out of the woods somewhat dissolved after barking like a dog whilst playing with a boner and whatnot and the villagers see that she’s been fucked and it can only be rape and it can only be the foreigner who’s done it. And yes, she says it was him. And they tear him to little pieces like the animals they are and the animal they think he is. You could feel a bit ambiguous about Mademoiselle at this point, morally speaking. But then, what’s she gonna say:”Yes, the wop and I, we were fucking, and frankly I thoroughly enjoyed myself!” Well, to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies: she wouldn’t, would she ?