Few seem to understand what this film is about, which is rank misogyny. That's really all there is to it. Jeanne Moreau, an intelligent woman who admitted to craving the unconventional, was the driving force behind the project. She presumably understood the film's basic theme and went for it. Mademoiselle is sadistic, perverse, capricious, and emotionally comatose.
Based on a discarded screenplay by the sadistic homosexual Jean Genet who was on a mission to subvert normative society, and with some tweaking by others, including the doyenne of non-conformist romantic anguish, Marguerite Duras, and directed by Tony Richardson, who was himself in the closet at that time, the film's gay credentials now look obvious, though at the time the hidden meaning would have been relatively obscure and it is no surprise that viewers at the time found the meaning of the film as garbled as the various languages spoken in this French village.
In any case, it was hardly possible though to mask the sociopathic malice of the main character and the clear implication that heterosexual passion is a nasty disease - a kind of insanity - sufficient to lead, in women, to bestial submission and the destruction of men, and, in men, to, well, at least a terrible waste of resources (from a gay point of view).
The static, wide-angle compositions are a thing of beauty though and are worth watching for their own sake. The technique goes some way to represent Mademoiselle's placid detachment from normality, and serves to mask the obviousness of the message - without it, the film would have been too blatant for its own good. Unfortunately, coupled with misogyny theme, the catatonic presentation turns the story into a dreary and rather unpleasant slog.
