"The Madwoman of Chaillot," based on a 1940s play by Jean Giraudoux, is one of those underappreciated treasures that rewards careful and repeated viewings. Like another parable/allegorical fairytale from Sixties filmmaking, "King of Hearts" (also set in France), it is an easy movie to dismiss as pretentious or longwinded. But this is to judge on surface appearances or to hold the film to a standard that it does not seek to attain. This work is a morality play, meant to instruct and illuminate; it is not a typical linear, real-world drama -- although the interweaving of the real world of contemporary Paris with the fantasy world inhabited by the Countess (Katharine Hepburn, who is brilliant as usual) and her coterie of elegant female eccentrics gives the movie much of its surface charm. Hepburn's Countess is not so much insane as preferring to live in an imaginary world of rosy nostalgia and wishful thinking. She and her friends fundamentally realize the difference between invention and fact but choose to generally ignore it.
Let me be the first reviewer here to suggest that the curious use of three aged women to represent the forces of justice at work in this dual world is a deliberate hearkening to the Weird Sisters of "Macbeth", or the Furies of Greek tragedy, or even the Fates themselves. Similarly, the huddled poor of the Parisian streets and the menial laborers mostly have no names because they represent archetypes, perhaps -- a Greek chorus full of accusations for their tormentors. They contrast starkly with the smooth amorality of the movie's duplicitous villains -- an oil tycoon, a clergyman, a general, a politician, a business consultant, and others -- played to icy perfection and with just the right amount of absurd black humor by Pleasance, Brynner, Gavin, and their partners. Richard Chamberlain, playing an idealistic activist, adds a dose of romanticism when he leaves the world of the "faceless pimps" (in the damning words of Danny Kaye's relentless Ragpicker) and journeys for the love of Irma, a poor waitress, into the shadow world of the Countess of Chaillot -- although in doing so, he must destroy Hepburn's illusions forever, prompting her to take a terrible vengeance on the "greedy, stupid, lost" men who have caused the world to "not be happy."
The climactic "trial" sequence, where the Ragpicker must play the devil's advocate on behalf of the collective monied classes, placed in the docket for crimes against humanity, is a masterful performance by Kaye, playing a non-clown role for once (who ever suspected he had it in him?). With honeyed words, he first seduces his "judges" into falling for his deceits; then, when his lies are exposed for the pretense they are, he turns into a raging, bellowing monster of hatred, openly proclaiming his naked desire for money and power merely to make war and destroy what's left of the earth. Finally the mask has slipped; the court renders its verdict; and Hepburn's meting out of justice is as dreadful as any judgment of Nemesis.
Which is all very ponderous and heavy, but you can really take this film two ways -- whimsical fantasy entertainment or something much deeper and disturbing. The choice rests with the viewer, much as it lies with the characters in the movie to choose which path they wish to pursue. "The Madwoman of Chaillot" may have been made over 30 years ago but the issues it raises and the attitudes it depicts are still very much with us today, and only someone as asleep and dreaming as the Countess wouldn't realize it.
