Une femme douce

I'm not crazy about Bresson's style from the 50's and onward (Completely stripped-down, lots of silence and voice-over narration, and an expressionless cast deliberately exhausted by strict positioning and endless retakes). A lot of his movies don't gain so much from that. Une Femme Douce is about as close to anorexia as a movie can get. Its delicate symbolism bulges out visibly like bones through the skin of a fleshless body.

It doesn't get under the main character's skin the way Dostoyevsky's did so masterfully in his short story with stream-of-consciousness writing. But the story nonetheless makes for a quite compelling film. With some fantastic shots of Dominique Sanda.

Obviously, Bresson couldn't deal with suicide, but nevertheless aspired to make a movie about it. So he made a film concerned with the usual french love story, and attempted to make it special by repeatedly showing the image of a dead young woman, whose acting skills is even worse than mine. I guess I can't blame him, dealing with post-suicide-guilt is why I stopped writing in the first place.

By marrying a young girl in difficult straits, a pawnbroker hopes to enjoy the benefits of their “inequality”, but events show the situation to be otherwise. A faithful but dessicated adaptation of the source material, whose theme of a man’s inability to hold onto a girl by calculative means is not so different from CONTEMPT. Added elements coming from theatre (Hamlet), recorded music, cinema and television – a theme that will be pursued in a more interesting way in FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER.

Le film va bien mais "peut-être que c'est trop simple pour être un film Bresson."

88.00

That late Bresson minimalist quality-purity. All his movies from 1950 onwards would be masterpieces if that was all there was to movies. But his ascetic strangeness-mystery is alluring, the more you wanna really delve into it.

Bresson's colour films were even bleaker than his B+W ones. While Une Femme Dounce is certainly well made, it lacks the broader context of A Devil Probably which at least provided a framework for the character's malady without giving us any concrete answers. No doubt a close formal analysis would reveal more, but I would have to see a great print of this film before bothering to delve deeper, so this rating is tentative.

It's a familiar story here, yet the way it's played is so inventive and rewarding. The disconnected style here is so strong it verges on surrealism, and it's what gives this modern romance critique its cold detached feeling that I warmed to.

Bresson at his psychological best--obscuring the motives of his characters and leaving the viewer in confusion over the fundamental mystery of the film: why did she kill herself? The regularity of doors, with people entering and leaving through them, seems to highlight the enclosed space in which the married couple finds themselves. Interestingly, the wife's final exit from their building comes through a means other than a door. Sanda is a revelation--bringing strength to her "gentle" persona.

The titular gentle woman might be Bresson's least psychologized character, even more so than the donkey Balthazar. The image of a metallic bedpost (either phallic or a metonym for prison) is centered in the cinematic frame whenever it's onscreen and embraced by both husband & wife: him as he's walking around her body on the bed; her before she takes the plunge, a scene where we spend some time alone with her, observing her while she refuses to reveal any greater understanding of herself.

Ac gozlerini, son bir olsun ac. Bresson'un renkli filmlerinin hepsi birbirinden guzel.

Bresson's minimalist tone fits pretty well with the film's themes of detachment and inability to communicate, and he does relax it a bit when necessary. It still stands out a little too often and as much as I liked the film I just couldn't love it. Dominique Sanda does a very good job, though, and for the most part Bresson makes good use of colour in his compositions.

Good movie, very insightful.