(Die Damen vom Bois de Boulogne [de])
France 1945
d: Robert Bresson
Arte TV (Region 0 de)
sc: Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau (based on the novel "Jacques le fataliste et son Maître" by Denis Diderot)
c: Philippe Agostini (b/w)
e: Jean Feyte
pd: Max Douy, Robert Lavallée
m: Jean-Jacques Grünenwald
p: Raoul Ploquin (Les Films Raoul Ploquin)
w: Paul Bernard, María Casares, Elina Labourdette, Lucienne Bogaert, Jean Marchat
pr: 21 Sep 1945
rt: 81:48 (+4%PAL= 84) min
dvd-rl: 01 Jun 2006
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French MPEG-2 2.0 Mono
st: --
supp: --
Like "Les Anges du Péché", Bresson's second feature, based on a self-contained anecdote in Diderot's novel "Jacques le Fataliste", is in many ways atypical of his oeuvre. He uses, quite brilliantly, professional actors. The visual texture is not muted grey, but sharp and contrasty. The camera is constantly prowling and tracking. The dialogue (by Cocteau) is brilliantly jewelled, literary to the point of preciousness, the very antithesis of the later monosyllabics. Yet as one watches the elegant socialite (played by Casarès with superbly steely venom) spin a cold-blooded plot to destroy her rival after being humiliatingly spurned in a liaison in the interests of true love, one could hardly be anywhere but in Bresson's world. Sexuality takes precedence over salvation, but there is the same interiority, the same intensity, the same rigorous exclusion of all inessentials.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" is, on the surface, the most accessible work from the maker of "Pickpocket", "Diary of a Country Priest", "A Man Escaped", etc. Taken from an episode in an eighteenth-century novel by Diderot and updated to a contemporary Paris setting, it concerns a beautiful woman, Hélène (Maria Casarès in her first starring role), who takes revenge on her ex-lover by luring him into marriage with a prostitute. The first step in her plot is to provide the young woman, Agnes, and her mother with shelter and privacy far away from Agnes' dance-hall clientele. After she arranges the meeting, the rest follows of its own accord. Only the result is something Hélène had not predicted. It is in contemporizing the story that Bresson takes his first step in the abstraction necessary to create this drama of love's triumph. For he thus removes the external character motivation and plot logic that arose naturally in the original story from the gross mis-match of a "gentleman" and a young woman of ill repute. From the start, then, things - from Hélène's original conception to Agnes' determined insistance on privacy - seem to be taking place on some level other than the obvious. Bresson further effects what some have called his "distanced" approach - but what is, in fact, a distillation of passions otherwise inexpressible - in Jean Cocteau's dialogue, and in a visual format that concentrates the action within confines having little determinable relationship to the outside. Even the Bois de Boulogne seems to consist of one corner, one waterfall.... Bresson has commented, "As far as I could, I have eliminated anything which might distract from the interior drama. For me, the cinema is an exploration within. Within the mind, the camera can grasp anything." This film was for years a thing of legend only; very few people had seen it since its original release, but those who did wrote of its extraordinary impact. On its first post-war revival in the early Sixties in the U.S., it proved a work of genius that more than lived up to its reputation. Today, one finds the name on the best ten lists of many critics, but only rarely does the film itself make an appearance.
— JB, PFA
