Cinema: Psychodrama

Mademoiselle is an exquisitely photographed flop in which three flamboyant talents compound each other's mistakes. Trying an English-language drama overladen with artsy Continental flavor, Director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) miscasts Jeanne Moreau, an actress far too frost-free to catch the temper of a frustrated spinster. She brings every subconscious drive boiling to the surface, and her roaring heterosexual readiness makes a parody of the screenplay by France's poet of perversion, Jean Genet.

As a provincial school teacher, Moreau expresses her lust for an Italian woodcutter (Ettore Manni) by scourging the countryside with fire, flood and poison. Moviegoers may take it or leave it; but those who stick around will probably want to amuse themselves by counting phallic symbols. Snakes and falling timber abound, and Mademoiselle's metaphor for the act of love is an ax blade buried in lumber. Xenophobia, pyromania and sundry aberrations are touched upon, while Genet catalogues the destructive power of Woman. On the night before the woodsman is beaten to death by the villagers who suspect him of her crimes, Moreau leads her victim through rainswept meadows in one of the longest and most ludicrous love marathons ever filmed.

Occasionally, Director Richardson entraps a darkly beautiful image, filling Moreau's unfathomable eyes with licks of reflected flame in a monstrous closeup. More often, Mademoiselle's effects are merely outlandish, and the film creates an overall impression of rich resources gone smashingly to waste.