La Tête de Normande St-Onge

Quite where the lady's head is at, as they used to say, is a question better left to clinical enquiry than the speculations of one unconvinced by the film's anti-psychiatric contortions. It's the sort of film where fantasies (erotic and otherwise) proliferate, and the lines between sanity and madness are purposefully blurred; as, in passing, are the lines between exploitation, voyeurism, and (?) art. The erratic Normande (an outsider like the heroine of Carle's The True Nature of Bernadette) she 'rescues' her mother from a mental home to set up a counter-culture family) is framed and reflected in a compatibly fragmented, flashy style, so it's all of a piece. Either you buy it or you don't - in which case it's intensely irritating.