Une femme douce [A Gentle Woman] [A Gentle Creature] **** (1969, Dominique Sanda, Guy Frangin, Jeanne Lobre) – Classic Movie Review 10,922

Director Robert Bresson’s austere and contemplative 1969 French tragic film Une femme douce [A Gentle Woman] is adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1876 short story A Gentle Creature. The film is Bresson’s first in colour, and set in 1960s contemporary Paris. Dominique Sanda, who plays the Gentle Woman, makes her debut in the film, starting her career as an actress.

Sanda’s character Elle steps off the balcony of her Parisian apartment, plunging to her death. Her distraught husband, Luc (Guy Frangin), looks over her dead body and explores why she might have killed herself in a talk to Anna the maid (Jeanne Lobre), in a series of flashbacks.

It is a kind of anti-love story, a desperately sad tale of tragic mismatch and miscommunication, leading to isolation, despair, desperation and ultimately death.

The film adheres closely to the short story, despite its 1960s Paris backgrounds, such as Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and Musée National d’Art Moderne. It is a rigorous, emotionally uncompromising yet rewarding film, made in Bresson’s usual ascetic style, with no dynamic dramatics or professional actors to get in the way.

Bresson adapted Dostoevsky again in his next film Quatre nuits d’un rêveur [Four Nights of a Dreamer] (1971, based on White Nights.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,922

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