Her father, now a private tutor, helped her to hone her writing skills and was very strict about using correct grammar. Instead, audiences will be most familiar with her work from two bonkers Netflix offerings: Michael Bay’s breathtakingly daft thriller 6 Underground, and from French-language sci-fi hokum Oxygen (Laurent wakes trapped in an airtight cryogenic box). One of the most moving aspects of The Mad Women’s Ball is the sense of sisterhood between the women. It turns out to be a miscalculated move as on the following day, Francois and Théophile take her to the notorious Salpatriere asylum.

But he is best remembered for his work with female “hysterics”, whom he treated with hypnosis, cauterisation of the cervix and compression of the ovaries, both with the hands and – over many hours – with a kind of medical vice. This article was amended on 16 September 2021 to remove an incorrect reference to The Mad Women’s Ball being Laurent’s debut film as director. Laurent sees such phenomena as showing that the world she depicts in her film is not just of historical interest. When Eugénie tells her that she knows what Jeanne’s mother did to her son, Jeanne breaks into tears. Charcot’s most famous patient was the beautiful Louise Augustine Gleizes, who was just 14 years old when she was admitted to the Salpêtrière in 1875.It is a historical drama about women misdiagnosed as hysterics and imprisoned in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital in 1885. At the asylum, she befriends other girls and realizes that the doctors are making them more deranged in the name of curing them. They are the direct subject of thousands of people who love their music and are thrilled to see them on stage. We soon come to realize that Eugénie possesses psychic powers that are outside the purview of scientific rationality. The story, borrowed from the titular novel by Victoria Mas, follows Eugénie, an outspoken and radiant psychic woman who gets admitted to an infamous asylum after confiding about her supernatural powers to her close ones.

When attending concerts in the usual manner, though, she noticed that “the energy in the audience doesn’t equal the energy performers feel on stage. Salma and Bilal are your typical British couple looking to move off the estate and into a quiet suburban neighborhood. In the film, Laurent herself plays Geneviève, the head nurse who mutates from the Gallic equivalent of Nurse Ratched into something like Chief Bromden. Artist and academic Lisa Perrin’s first book is a gorgeously illustrated and designed collection of biographies of that most romantic and maligned of villainesses: the poisoner.She was a pianist from an upper-class family, and she was locked away by her stepbrother because he did not want to share his inheritance with her. But Laurent insists that her latest project will not – unlike The Mad Women’s Ball – be an indictment of the patriarchy. Mas notes that although Eugenie – the heroine of her novel – is a middle-class girl, most inmates in Charcot’s ward were “poor girls, often illiterate, which is why it was so hard for me to find records of them. I’m tired of the fosse [chasm] we put between women and men sometimes and I want to show something else.