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    ‘The Mad Women’s Ball’ Review: A Shock Within the System

    The French actor-director Mélanie Laurent delivers a feminist melodrama about the abuses of a Paris hospital in the 19th century.In its opening moments, “The Mad Women’s Ball” slowly focuses on the nape of a woman’s neck and the swirl of her hair pinned in a bun. It is an image that may recall Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Here it confirms that the director Mélanie Laurent’s drama — set in Paris in the late 1800s and based on a novel by Victoria Mas — will indeed touch on horrors.The daughter of a status-driven father, Eugénie (Lou de Laâge) appears haunted by spirits. Talking with her grandmother or readying for bed, she’ll begin rapidly breathing, trembling, staring at something that no one else sees. She also tends to speak her mind. To the heartbreak of her loving brother (Benjamin Voisin), Eugénie is committed by her father to the asylum where a diagnosis of hysteria has become all the rage. The soiree of the title was an actual event thrown at the Salpêtrière hospital during the tenure of the famed neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.Depicted here, the gathering is as grotesque as one might fear. It is also a high point in the patients’ comradeship. Eugénie becomes a catalyst, nudging the head nurse, Geneviève (portrayed by Laurent), toward doubts about the ethics of her beloved institution.Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is. A feminist work, “The Mad Women’s Ball” grapples, too, with the ways women can be complicit. Emmanuelle Bercot does chilly work as Jeanne, the nurse Charcot calls on to manage Eugénie’s solitary confinement. Move over, Nurse Ratched.The Mad Women’s BallNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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    ‘White as Snow’ Review: The Fairest of Them All

    The director Anne Fontaine spins the Snow White fairy tale into a thriller, with Isabelle Huppert as the jealous stepmother.Whatever rehabilitation wicked stepmothers have undergone of late encounters a setback in “White as Snow.” Isabelle Huppert brings a frost to her role as Maud in the director Anne Fontaine’s darkly playful gloss on the Snow White saga. Lou de Laâge portrays the hotelier’s shy, impossibly lovely stepdaughter and rival, Claire.This is fairy tale as comedically aware thriller. There are red apples; red, red dresses; and long, self-appraising glances into the mirror on Maud’s part. Of course, her jealousy is misdirected. Her husband, Bernard (Charles Berling), is a besotted fool, trying to assuage his own anxieties about aging. But the die is cast, nonetheless.Once Claire finds herself deep in the woods, conveyed there by a hired killer and saved by a hunter with a twin back at a large stone farmhouse, nature gets its redolent due, with farmland and forest providing a backdrop to sexual congress. Claire’s brush with death frees her of any erotic inhibitions but never represses her ample decency and kindness. (How many men does Claire encounter? Seven, naturally.)Quite a few of the film’s pleasures come by way of its fluid tango with the source material. Fontaine and her co-writer, Pascal Bonitzer, manage several didn’t-see-that-coming zags. Nods to Hitchcock abound with the aid of the cinematographer Yves Angelo’s tracking shots and the composer Bruno Coulais’s low foreboding notes.As satisfying as Huppert is, the movie dances on the pinpoint of de Laâge’s performance. The name Claire signifies light and clarity, and there’s a transparency to de Laâge’s portrayal of this innocent who remains thus while discovering a lavish sensuality.White as SnowNot rated. In French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More