Una mujer dulce

The nail in the coffin in this extraordinary film is very similar to the burnt out stake at the end of Bresson's 'The Trial of Joan of Arc'. It says quite simply, this is the end, it is finished. The tortured soul of the woman played to perfection by Dominique Sanda seeks a finality to her suffering, and her combat with the world. She has had enough of material values and struggles, and like any inwardly imprisoned soul, she achieves her release. The playing time of the film is short but it contains many images of the world surrounding her; a visit to a cinema and a mediocre film on the screen, watching a performance of 'Hamlet', giving too much money away in her pawnbroker husband's shop. She does not relate to this, and her husband, brilliantly acted by Guy Frangin, tries to tame her into accepting the ways of a selfish, money orientated world. She states clearly she is not concerned with money, and as far as I can see she marries out of a sense of despair and not love, perhaps knowing that her husband will push her to the limit of endurance and give her the strength to execute herself. As in the Joan of Arc story, she is resigned to execution as the only way out of an existence she cannot understand. For Elle (which literally means she) her husband will be her executioner, not by intent, but by simply being the very opposite to her with his soiled humanity. She aims a gun at his head and Sanda's eyes say it all. For a moment she wants to kill her killer, but knows by putting down the gun that she is the one to be killed, and that person can only be herself. As for the film itself, only Bresson could have made it, with his austere vision of the human hell we live in. Watch 'The Devil, Probably' and 'Mouchette' to see that only the killing of the body we inhabit can save us. A negative interpretation? I have no idea. It is just what I saw in this great and seldom seen film. I have a poor copy of it and it is a disgrace that unlike most of Bresson's films this one is so hard to find. It is up there with the finest he made, and his use of muted colour only enhances the trivialities and the transience of Paris in 1969. That Paris has gone, but a Paris with even more materialism has taken its place. For those who recall the city 50 years ago, it is moving to see a once celebrated bookshop 'La Hune' sandwiched between two cafes of literary repute, and to see the same place now transformed into an excess of empty luxury goods and even more monetary values. Elle in 'Une Femme Douce' would I believe sacrifice herself again.

Bresson's vision is honest. No wonder his works gonna be so disturbing all the time. It's like some kind of a weapon, will shot through some people's guts. A people like Elle's husband. He is an interesting person.

He's gonna try to explain all about her, so we expect as well, what exactly the cause was? What's happen to them? Mostley Elle. But he couldn't explain clearly what's happened exactly. Cos he explain about her which he knew, but won't explain which don't know about her. Maybe that's the point. What Bresson wanted to express.

Not enough lines, but silence speaks. It speaks like a knife. Sanda is very attractive, her appearance sharpened it.

Bresson is one of the great artists of cinema. Une femme douce a masterpiece and probably his most satisfying film.

Une femme douce is enigmatic, subtle, full of ellipses and misunderstandings. It is a moving analysis of the loneliness of a marriage and the unsatisfactory human condition: on the one hand there is blindness to reality, and on the other the intuition of a need and an impossibility to transcend that artificial reality that we construct for ourselves.

The characters are locked in a life of sufficient economic relief, in a complacent conformity that suffocates the young woman. The film narrates this chronic dissatisfaction with a life that is reduced to systematically improving material conditions.

Without stridency, without effects, with profound humility, Bresson's style was never more suitable, never more static and transcendent than in this film of two solitary beings: a man locked in his own prison and a woman caged in the golden cage of economic security.

The first scene shows us the girl's suicide in a static and unforgettable shot: the table that seems to collapse eternally on the balcony indicates that the girl has just jumped into the void and at the same time gives the sensation of an unfinished action, which It seems to stop in time.

Next the husband remembers before the corpse how he met her, fell in love with her, and saved/bought her.

The girl has had a past of economic hardship, of squalor; the boy has had a setback that has taught him how fragile prosperity is.

There is something of a hunted and trapped beast in Sanda's gaze. From there everything is mystery and conjecture in the marriage relationship.

Une femme douce is the great leap in Bresson's style towards his final maturity, that of works in color. Afterwards there will be no substantial purges.

I only have one scene left over: that awful representation of Hamlet, with its subsequent commentary, seems like a declaration of principles, an aesthetic creed enunciated without any elegance. An incomprehensible beginner's mistake in an author in full maturity.

Robert Bresson has an established reputation as one of the most artistic and "difficult" directors in history, but two out of his three films that I have watched so far ("Une Femme Douce" and "Four Nights Of A Dreamer" - the third is "Mouchette", for the record) are quite accessible - if you approach them on their own terms. "Une Femme Douce" unfolds at its own pace, and although it has the structure of a mystery, it is more of a psychological drama. Bresson's precise framing is notable, and the main theme of trying to find spirituality in a money-driven world is as timely as ever. Bresson can also be credited for introducing Dominique Sanda to the world (this is her acting debut), and we thank him for it. A quietly absorbing, subtly powerful film. *** out of 4.

I've had difficulty with Bresson films in the past, because I love what he despises - acting. His films seem to rely on Kuleshov effect, which is to say that you have to feel the actors' emotions by extrapolating from the events that just happened, rather than reading their faces. Some people find this easier than others, for myself, when I watch Kuleshov's experiment I see only a neutral face when the frame cuts to a neutral face! However the Dostoevsky source for this movie is so rich that it allowed Bresson's style to work for me.

Une Femme Douce is a story of a love that fails, and feels very realistic. The success is down to the Bressonian style, which I usually find antithetical. Normal people as opposed to professional actors, are not very facially demonstrative; so when I saw the couple in this movie I really felt like I was watching a real couple. The lack of demonstration leads to a sense of ambiguity at key moments. There's a kind of Renoir-ian multifacetedness which tends to see a person as a congregation of souls pulling in different directions, jostling for the rudder, rather than as a coherent identity. But there's also ambiguity in the sense that the couple plain just can't read each other at points. There are several examples of uncorrected miscommunication in the film which again feels very authentic in terms of relationships.

Some people have great difficulty finding someone to love and share their lives with, may only get one attempt at something that could work, and often fail. That's a great, very human tragedy, that you don't get to see very often at the cinema. This story of a young couple, the man a pawnbroker, Luc, the woman simply known as "elle", is a story of two people who don't fit in modern life. She is fey, inquisitive, at home with the natural, distrustful of people, and entirely at odds with the systems of living that define human "progress". Luc is the opposite, a creature of the system, he makes money from debt, has fixed expectations about relationships, and lacks spontaneity. She suffers from weltschmerz, a pain of the sensitive that arises from an understanding or feeling of how life could or should be in comparison to the dismal and feeble structures that we have. They try to inhabit the centre ground together, but the compromise doesn't hold.

I like that the film acknowledges that even the most significant moments in a person's life can be fairly banal, a fleeting disengaged conversation on a bench at the zoo in this film.

Although I chose to see the film as a rather blameless story, you could view "elle" as the victim of Luc, who compares himself to Mephistopheles at one point. The film is feminist under that sense, although I think in a very patronising way. For example, at various points in the movie, the TV in their apartment shows spectacles which are very male-oriented, such as motor car racing. There's a sense that culture is about the male, that authentic female culture is something rare and unpreserved. I don't think that "elle"'s condition is unique to women, it actually reminds me RD Laing on schizophrenia: "The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation."

It's worth pointing out that the film is substantially aided by the talents of Ghislain Cloquet, one of the great cinematographers, who certainly was shooting only top drawer material in this film.

It is a matter of irony to me that although Bresson chose non-professionals, as usual, for this film, Dominique Sanda ("elle") later went on to win Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival seven years later. The role demanded someone beautiful, so Bresson picked her up from her job as a model for Vogue. Guy Frangin (Luc) on the other hand has this film as his only credited role.