The perfect opportunity, it would seem, is the upcoming Mad Women’s Ball, the annual Lenten gala that invites the Parisian elite to come dance and mingle with the “exotic creatures” kept caged in Salpetriere. She rightly sees Jeanne’s mother admitted to the same hospital, but it’s no secret, according to Jeanne. I didn’t want to depict him as a very cold doctor, even though he was a divisive figure… I think he genuinely wanted to help the women in his care, but… it is for the reader to decide.

Upon protesting, Eugénie is prescribed the cold water treatment, followed by the hot water treatment.

Twelve years ago, Mélanie Laurent was shooting Inglourious Basterds, playing a Jewish fugitive on the run from diabolical Christoph Waltz. Foucault stresses in his prophetic ‘Madness and Civilization’ that man’s self-attachment ultimately makes him accept violence and ugliness as beauty and justice, which forces an illusory reality onto him. Salma and Bilal are your typical British couple looking to move off the estate and into a quiet suburban neighborhood.

Therefore, while her father readily dismisses the seemingly irrational miracle, Geneviève puts her faith in Eugénie.Dissuaded from her father, Geneviève comes to realize that the disciplinary mechanism of the institution is informed by blind-eyed patriarchy. Laurent means the behavioural modification facilities, also known as tough love or wilderness camps for “troubled teens”, that were indicted last year in a documentary by Paris Hilton.

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. They previously launched CucoTV, an app with similar content and that continues to offer superb functioning.One of the most moving aspects of The Mad Women’s Ball is the sense of sisterhood between the women. By this time, we realize that Eugénie has no psychological anomalies whatsoever – she is instead a visionary seer. When I talk of the public fascination with the breakdowns of celebrities such as Britney Spears (who, like Mas’s subjects, felt public outbursts were her only way of rebelling against unbreakable male control) she nods. It’s weird to observe how we make revolutions, how we want to be different and how we become totally insane in other ways.

But Mas says, “It is important to say that the women seemed to suffer fewer problems in the weeks before the ball. She learned to express herself through dance at the hospital and went on to be one of the most famous dancers at the Moulin Rouge – she was drawn by Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec. Unlike many Eighties celebrities, Mas says, her mother “always had total creative control over her music, her looks and music videos”. We know how to get better and it is so strange to me that we regress and go back to something that was not bearable. 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.

Originally a gunpowder factory, the building was converted by Louis XIV into a hospital, mainly to treat women with epilepsy, intellectual and physical disabilities. Hysteria, the film suggests, was then a catch-all term that enabled male doctors to control women, many of whom had been previously abused. Now, with the act, Geneviève is diagnosed as mentally ill, and in a twisted turn of fate, serves her own time in the asylum.