Les anges du péché

This first Bresson effort has not worn well.The director himself did not like it,and it is sure easy to see why.A non -French audience will not notice it,but the actresses here are professional,some of them were stars of the era.The great Sylvie,Renée Faure,Jany Holt were famous in France when they starred in "les Anges du Péché" .Some were to become ,like Silvia Montfort,whose whining acting is in direct contrast to everything RB would do afterward .

Can today's audience relate to those characters?I have my doubts.This is an excellent documentary : a nun's life is no laughing party (for that matter,see also Zinnemann's "a nun's story" and Alain Cavalier's "Thérese").But the nun from the bourgeoisie who tries to redeem a criminal 's soul will not convince anybody,unless he absolutely loves the director.

It's little more than a Sulpician melodrama.

An absorbing melodrama with great performances from Renée Faure, Sylvie and Jany Holt. Novice nun Anne-Marie, slightly worryingly over-confident, embarks on a fervent mission to redeem a particularly troubled convict, Thérèse.

The script is really strong, and particularly as it portrays the life of the convent. The saints'-wisdom-tombola and the conversation in the laundry are charming, and the ceremonies and submissions quietly powerful.

Anne-Marie's urge to do good becomes increasingly insufferable, and then unhinged to the point where she denounces the sisters' pet cat. The cat, rather than her thankless protégé Thérèse, whose response to Anne-Marie's selfless love, or perhaps her foolish religious pride, comes increasingly to the fore in a deeply moving ending.

Contrary to what you might expect from a 1943 movie about nuns in a convent, Les Anges du Peche is fast, intense and gripping. The writing (by a Dominican priest, Raymond Bruckberger) is awe-inspiring; nearly every line of dialogue is a cluster of moral and emotional insights. Explored with great wisdom are themes of conformity and nonconformity, selfishness and selflessness, sin and redemption, love, jealousy and bitter resentment, pride and shame.

I am not sure if I have ever seen as forceful a feature debut as Bresson's. Don't overlook it - it is arguably better than his more well-regarded works.

Robert Bresson's first feature film, ANGELS OF SIN examines the power of religious piety and sets the story within a Dominican convent where female ex-cons are rehabilitated, and makes great play of a professional cast.

Our angelic protagonist is Sister Anne-Marie (Faure), hailed from a well-to-do family, but resolves to devote herself to the noble work of reforming the sinner, and her prime object is Thérèse (Holt), a prisoner claims that she is innocent, and right upon her release, she takes her revenge to the man who should be accountable for her imprisonment and then joins the convent to dodge the punishment, much to Anne-Marie's delight (who doesn't twig her true purpose), who takes Thérèse under her wing.

But Anne-Marie's beneficent intention and zealous alacrity is brushed aside by Thérèse's penitence-free lying-low stopgap, who in turn, cunningly stokes discords between a naive and vivacious Anne-Marie and the more stolid and jealousy-inflamed ones whose telling opinions of the former are at once self-revealing and acrimonious, after a squabble about a black cat, its fallout has Anne-Marie ousted from the convent, but it takes her sacrificial final act (a bit sickly though) to finalize her lofty mission, redemption is achieved with haunting clarity in its solemn coda.

A rigid exercise in his craft of shaping up a spiritual parable, Bresson's self-disciplined style is in its inchoate state, stunning chiaroscuro and beatific soft focus compositions notwithstanding, the story has been retouched with a sentimental glamor mostly owing to Renée Faure's virtuous performance in the center, an effect soon Bresson would ditch roundly after THE LADIES OF THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE (1945), whereas a fiercely snarky Jany Holt manifests more stamina and inscrutability which is more likely consonant with Bresson's aesthetics.

The internal power play and peer pressure inside a convent is only scuffed without patent virulence, which saves us from another nun-demonizing diatribe and grants Bresson a more sagacious eye on religion and humanity, although ANGELS OF SIN can be hardly extolled as a groundbreaking jumping-off point from a future auteur.

Before World War Two, France had one of the most vibrant movie scenes in the world, just behind Hollywood and Germany. But with the onslaught of WW2, most of the French filmmakers fled the continent. However, director/scriptwriter Robert Bresson decided to stay, and took advantage of the void to direct his first feature film, June 1943's "Angels of Sin." He would direct only thirteen full-length films, but his impact in cinema remains high, especially to those working in film in the late 1950s during what is known as the 'French New Wave' era.

Jean-Luc Godard placed Bresson in the highest echelon of French film directors. "Bresson is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Francois Truffaut called him one of the very few true "auteurs." At 42 when Bresson handled his first feature film in "Angels of Sin," he had spent his younger years as a painter and a photographer. Bresson had directed only one short film, 1934's 'Public Affairs,' but he had written four film scripts prior to 1940 which became movies. Enlisting in the French Army when war broke out, Bresson was captured by the Germans and spent a year in a prisoner-of-war camp before paroled.

Under Germany's thumb, Vichy France restructured French cinema, and the dearth of filmmaking talent made Bresson a highly-sought after commodity. The Catholic director was assisted by famous dramatist Jean Giraudoux and Dominican priest Raymond Bruckberger, who suggested a book on the Sisters of Bethany who rehabilitate female convicts. Bresson's screenplay is centered on Anne-Marie (Renee Faure), a do-gooder who decides to join a convent to help those incarcerated. Her first assignment is Therese (Jany Holt), a bitter woman who unwittingly took the rap for her boyfriend's stealing. Once Therese is paroled, she immediately kills her former lover, and seeks to hide out from the police by joining the convent. Therese, the nunnery's bully, gets Anne-Marie in trouble where she's banned from the convent. Anne-Marie is so persistent in her attempts to reform Therese she repeatedly slinks back at night, leading to a spiritual awakening for both. "However distant from his later work it may be," says film reviewer Erik Ulman, "'Angels of Sin' remains not only recognizably a Bresson film, but one of great power." This is one of only two movies he had hired professional actors; all his others consist strictly of amateurs. His debut set a commonality which appears throughout his future movies, including his characters' salvation and redemption. Like his subsequent films, Bresson's pares down superfluous details of events not crucial to the main plot, known as ellipsis.

Some critics draw a parallel between the convent and Vichy France in "Angels of Sin" which Bresson subtly gives certain hints. German officials monitored each of the 230 films produced by the French during WW2, carefully inspecting and cutting any negativity towards the Axis powers. Popular for French film-goers during the war were adaptations of literature and drama, crime and melodramatic thrillers. German and Italian-produced films attracted only flies in France. Film critic Greg Klymkiw noticed "Angels in Sin" "deals very cleverly and subtly with the way in which the nunnery operates in comparison to the prison and most importantly, how the secular world is essentially the Vichy and the religious world, the Resistance." "Angels of Sin" was Bresson's only directed film during the war. But it was a springboard to one of the most fertile body of works in French cinema by one director.