Une Femme Douce

Dominique Sanda in Une Femme Douce

Robert Bresson's Une Femme Douce, from 1969 is an astringent amalgam of Bresson's and Dostoyevsky's sensibilities. Despite their stylistic differences, there is a shared moral concern between the two. In Dostoyevsky's A Gentle Creature, the source of Une Femme Douce, the spiritual stagnation (kosnost) of the narrator drives his wife to suicide. The narrator in both versions is a pawnbroker who castigates his young bride when he thinks she is being overly generous in settling with clients. 

Dominique Sanda, in her film debut, plays the young woman, named Elle. She marries in haste, a union that brings both partners torment; as in a good number of the love pairings in the curdled and crazed oeuvre of the Russian master. Une Femme Douce marks a shift in Bresson's work. This is his first color film and the first of his films in which any hope of escape from one's confines, be they material or spiritual, is refuted. Cages and containers are a constant motif in the film, most obviously in the visits to the zoo and natural history museum. Bresson shares Dostoyevsky's abhorrence of modern spiritual stagnation. The opening sequence in the pawnshop, with numerous closeups of hands exchanging trinkets for cash, establishes the capitalistic France of 1968 as a transactional culture. Christian values of love and charity, which Elle seeks to emulate, are in short supply. Bresson would continue pursuing this condemnation of usury, most forcefully in his ultimate film, L'Argent.   

In an indelible debut, Ms. Sanda is otherworldly. As her husband, Guy Frangin is appropriately chilly and repellent. This is his only film credit, testimony to Bresson's desire to work with non-professionals. This strategy yielded some of the most indelible and non-actorly performances in the cinema, but it is off-putting to a lot of viewers. Nevertheless, Une Femme Douce, which jettisons some supporting characters from the original story, is a succinct and discordant masterpiece.