“So, I was alone, this bird had flown” ~ Norwegian Wood (Lennon/McCartney)  

Robert Bresson adapted Dostoevsky’s The Gentle Woman for his 1969 take on the Russian master's story of a doomed marriage. As was his habit, Bresson cast non-actors for his film, or ‘models’ as he considered them, and in the case of the titular character he cast an actual model in the form of 18-year-old fashion model Dominique Sanda. Bresson changed the age gap in the 1876 original short story, making the husband closer in age to the young woman and cast Guy Frangin as Luc, the pawnshop owner who marries Elle. Une femme douce was Bresson’s first film in colour, shot by cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, who had previously shot the black and white masterpieces Au Hazard, Balthazar and Mouchette for Bresson.   

A young woman jumps from an apartment on the Boulevard St. Germain to her death on the pavement below. Her husband Luc (Guy Frangin) brings her body to their apartment and remembers Elle (Dominique Sanda) as a student forced to pawn her possessions to survive when they first met. He sits with her body and talks about their past to Anna (Jeanne Lobra), the maid who had worked for them since they were married not long before, and we see their relationship as a series of flashbacks leading up to the tragedy. 

After his two mid-sixties,black and white masterpieces, Robert Bresson then made one of his most urban excursions set in the middle of Paris and in colour to boot. He changed the setting to a contemporary one, and from Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg, but other than that he stays faithful to the source material.Bresson saw this as an essay on the inability to communicate between a married couple and declared he’d wanted to film the adaptation because, ‘Dostoevsky works with feelings, and I believe in feelings.’   

‘In the cinema, when you photograph somebody, you kill them on the film. It’s dead images.’ 
~ Robert Bresson 

The space between death and life is deliberately blurred by Bresson, barely distinguishing between sequences of her husband on the bed with the dead woman, or with her when she was alive. The husband tries to make sense of the tragedy by reviewing their life together in a dialogue with the housekeeper as they sit with the corpse, but in true Bressonian fashion answers are elusive and ambiguities abound. The austere Jean Wiener score and the sombre tones of the Ghislain Cloquet shoot are in perfect concert with Bresson’s careful pacing and sometimes oblique sensibilities. The opening suicide is typical, we don’t see the act, merely intimations of the event around it - the falling table, the floating scarf... it’s part of Bresson’s ability to integrate poetry into banal or everyday events and thus uncovering some sort of hidden truth or deeper meaning.  

Like much of Bresson’s work, this film feels like a floating question mark where finding an answer may not even be the point. Elle is a misfit from the start and the couple poorly matched and yet each find something in the other that they think might answer some part of some question – maybe. In the half light of these misunderstood notions the couple play out a brief and awkward courtship – Elle is forced to sell family belongings at the pawnbrokers and Luc ingratiates himself with her to enables his continued romantic pursuit setting up the Bressonian conflict between realist and dreamer. The notion of the gap between the profane and the spiritual is etched out subtly when the religious icon Elle pawns is taken apart by Luc, who keeps the gold of the crucifix but offers her the figure of Christ, which she refuses.  

“Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music” ~ Jean Luc Godard 

In keeping with his philosophy of avoiding actors, Bresson cast non-actors in the lead roles and Dominique Sanda proved so adept she enjoyed a long and successful career in French film – not so for Guy Frangin, as this appears to be his only film. Sanda was a fashion model but it perfect as the shy, withdrawn girl wondering where she fits in a world whose workings seem mysterious and opaque. Sanda is instinctive and vulnerable and effortlessly conveys the heartbreaking existential conflict at the core of her character, bringing to it a delicate intensity. This contrapuntal and contradictory elements are ones that Bresson amplifies, and her detachment with his trademark visual approach of showing the character at a remove from her surrounds, seen through windows, in mirrors, or on the other side of a wire fence – shorthand for a woman on the other side of her own life. 

This is pure Bresson, and he has Frangin match her blankness but in a way that plays as calculating instead of innocent, contrasting the two approaches. Luc thinks Elle should be grateful he’s provided her an out from her poverty and reduced circumstances, but Elle values something ‘other’ - even if she can’t quite define what that ‘other’ is. This elliptical dance of desire and confusion is at the heart of the piece as Luc narrates the events that lead us to the beginning of the film. That we know what is coming doesn’t lessen the impact or reduce the enigma to a who or why-dunnit, we merely find that the enigma (like the Dude) abides.  

‘Suicide answers a call to heaven’ is a quote from Bresson, and an odd one from a man who was close to Jansenist philosophy. Jansenism was a Roman Catholic religious movement for whom suicide was a mortal sin and a disbarment from heaven – but Bresson also equivocated about belief saying, ‘At least one day I believe the next day I don’t, but I believe anyway that there’s something more than just living on the earth.’ Elle seems uncertain too, but there is at least some hope of grace on the other side of her life as opposed to no hope with the life she is enduring. She takes the literal leap of faith, and the answer lies in the stillness and silence of her serene corpse. Jansenism posited predestination amongst its various tenets, so Elle was always going to take that leap and leave the remaining humans to figure out the meaning, mysterious ways and all. Of course, the gap between devout religious belief and mental illness is a small one. 

Bresson was a true artist, as much a painter as filmmaker in as much as he composed canvases that offered more than just the constructed images he chose to show. His art was a series of painstaking attempts to explore a hidden world; one he may have associated with the divine but one which is perfectly accessible to non-believers interested in existential questions and the continued search for meaning in an indifferent and infinite universe. Une femme douce is a late career masterpiece from a singular director and a must see for cinema lovers who value intelligent, thoughtful films that stay with you long after you’ve seen ‘Fin’.