Robert Bresson's Une femme douce | A Gentle Woman (1969)

Une femme douce is based on Dostoevski's short story 'Krotkaya' ('A Meek Creature' (1876)). 'J. S.', in his article 'Doute et certitude: « Une femme douce » in Esprit (Nouvelle Serie 386  (11) (November 1969)) quotes from Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planétarium (1959): 'On n'a pas encore découvert ce langage qui pourrait exprimer d'un seul coup ce qu'on perçoit en un clin d'oeil : tout un être et ses myriades de petits mouvements, surpris dans quelques mot, un rire, un geste' ('We haven't yet discovered the language to immediately express what we can see in the blink of an eye: a whole being and his/her multitudinous tiny movements, caught in a few words, a laugh, a gesture.'). This is what Robert Bresson tries to convey in his films.

Une femme douce is Bresson's ninth film, and his first in (admittedly subdued) colour. It begins in a somewhat un-Bressonian manner in that there is the noise of Paris at night, the rush of traffic, and so on. This rush, this crazy traffic movement is repeated on the few occasions that the television set is switched on in this film, but otherwise it's pure Bresson: little movement, little speech, few emotions revealed.

The generally poker-faced movements of the protagonists – Elle (Dominique Sanda) and Lui (Guy Frangin) – betray virtually no emotions and the viewer is forced to guess their psychology through the opaqueness. Right from the beginning we learn that the wife has killed herself by jumping from the flat balcony, her shawl floating slowly downwards as if in some kind of symbolic fashion.

Lui is then left to tell the story in linear fashion, or rather his own inevitably biased story as he pieces things together, revealing a tale of excuses, missed moments in which he could possibly have saved the relationship, but perhaps above all displaying a tale feminists could easily attack him for.

On one occasion Elle accuses Lui of using her as a kind of sales proposition: so the viewer assumes, poor female student orphan with virtually no money pawning her treasures to a pawnbroker who makes his money from exploiting the poor. And the man is attracted to her, takes pity on her, and asks her to marry him, which she accepts. And apparently willingly, as (in her largely taciturn way) she initially seems to enjoy the sex.

But jealousy barges in, and Lui is alarmed (to the point of taking a gun with him) by Elle's attentions towards another man, but maybe he's overreacting. Is he overreacting when he leaves the revolver within easy reach as he pretends to be sleeping? Why does he risk his life, as he knows that Elle is pointing a gun a blank range at his face?

And although she doesn't shoot he arranges a separate single bed for her, still leaving the revolver out, but she falls ill briefly, recovers, bursts into spontaneous tears and after he leaves in the morning to his pawnbroking job downstairs she just throws herself out the window. Back to the beginning, and it could be that the feminist and/or Marxist takes are red herrings.