Robert Bresson-Une femme douce (1969)

A young woman kills herself, leaving no explanation to her grief-stricken pawnbroker husband. We learn in flashback about how they met, married, and how she failed to adapt her lifestyle to his. Disgusted with his attempts to dominate her, she considered murdering him, but found herself unable to do it… (http://imdb.com/title/tt0065152/plotsummary)




A curtain blows near an open window. A limp, crooked arm lays on the street, followed by motionless hands and the back of a head. Finally we see the dead body of a young woman (Dominique Sanda) and the crowd of feet that have gathered around, the scene of a suicide….




Her story is related in flashback by her husband (Guy Frangin), a guilt-ridden pawnbroker who paces around her body lying in state. A couple like any other, they attend movies and theater, argue, make up, and make love. But director Robert Bresson shows us only the girl's sadness and systematic smothering under her husband's greed, jealousy, and increasing control. Even when the soundtrack erupts in peals of joy and laughter, such moments are left offscreen….




It's Bresson's first color film and he mutes the colors to such a dull flatness that the interiors are like a dark, suffocating prison. Only in the sun do the screen and the girl spark to life. It's as rigorous as any of Bresson's works–the characters, tellingly, are not given names and there's a marvelous tension between the claustrophobic home life and the busy world of city streets and art galleries outside–but the picture lacks the understated beauty of his previous films until the climax….




Bresson plays her suicide as a lovely, delicate gesture of freedom, a powerful, painful, achingly beautiful moment of resignation and transcendence all in one graceful gesture. (–Sean Axmaker - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




Bresson's brilliant adaptation of Dostoevsky's short story (A Gentle Creature) exhibits in its lapidary sequences the political and existential revolt of a young student in Paris. Sharing a theme that can be traced from Bresson's Mouchette to his fantastic exploration of revolutionary choices in The Devil Probably, Une Femme Douce articulates in its inimitable minimalist mode a range of issues from the ideological options of France post-May '68 to human relationships. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0065152/usercomments)




Dominique Sanda is not the conventional, recognizable student revolutionary, but a "gentle" philosopher whose powers of sensitivity and social scrutiny exceed and tease the prosaic, crude disposition of her bourgeois husband. The sequences in the zoo, the museum of natural history and the performance of Hamlet are powerful. On another note, look out for Indian experimental filmmaker Kumar Shahani who was assisting Bresson at this time, sitting diagonally behind Sanda in the sequence at the movie theater. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0065152/usercomments)




In UNE FEMME DOUCE, Bresson tells the story of a beautiful young woman's suicide without emotion or tragedy and with great awareness of the coldness and detachment that hallmark the final stages of some suicidal depressions. Many critics have approached this film warily, calling it a "minor work" or citing elements of its story as "inexplicable." But perhaps that is its strength; Bresson has made a wholly successful film about inexplicability, about the warped and supersensitive reactions and motivations of a mind drifting downward and downward. (amazon.com)




The hardest thing to understand about a self-destructive act is "why?" – the "why?" is the most feared component of suicide. UNE FEMME DOUCE is the most direct addressing of "why?" ever put on film. Bresson delivers a fascinating answer, one that takes a couple of viewings to distill. The more you think about UNE FEMME DOUCE, the more it becomes a vital work in Bresson's thematic panoply, and certainly the foundation work for his late nihlistic flowering. This is a film to watch and ponder again and again. (amazon.com)