Bresson is one of the great artists of cinema. Une femme douce a masterpiece and probably his most satisfying film.
Une femme douce is enigmatic, subtle, full of ellipses and misunderstandings. It is a moving analysis of the loneliness of a marriage and the unsatisfactory human condition: on the one hand there is blindness to reality, and on the other the intuition of a need and an impossibility to transcend that artificial reality that we construct for ourselves.
The characters are locked in a life of sufficient economic relief, in a complacent conformity that suffocates the young woman. The film narrates this chronic dissatisfaction with a life that is reduced to systematically improving material conditions.
Without stridency, without effects, with profound humility, Bresson's style was never more suitable, never more static and transcendent than in this film of two solitary beings: a man locked in his own prison and a woman caged in the golden cage of economic security.
The first scene shows us the girl's suicide in a static and unforgettable shot: the table that seems to collapse eternally on the balcony indicates that the girl has just jumped into the void and at the same time gives the sensation of an unfinished action, which It seems to stop in time.
Next the husband remembers before the corpse how he met her, fell in love with her, and saved/bought her.
The girl has had a past of economic hardship, of squalor; the boy has had a setback that has taught him how fragile prosperity is.
There is something of a hunted and trapped beast in Sanda's gaze. From there everything is mystery and conjecture in the marriage relationship.
Une femme douce is the great leap in Bresson's style towards his final maturity, that of works in color. Afterwards there will be no substantial purges.
I only have one scene left over: that awful representation of Hamlet, with its subsequent commentary, seems like a declaration of principles, an aesthetic creed enunciated without any elegance. An incomprehensible beginner's mistake in an author in full maturity.
Une femme douce is enigmatic, subtle, full of ellipses and misunderstandings. It is a moving analysis of the loneliness of a marriage and the unsatisfactory human condition: on the one hand there is blindness to reality, and on the other the intuition of a need and an impossibility to transcend that artificial reality that we construct for ourselves.
The characters are locked in a life of sufficient economic relief, in a complacent conformity that suffocates the young woman. The film narrates this chronic dissatisfaction with a life that is reduced to systematically improving material conditions.
Without stridency, without effects, with profound humility, Bresson's style was never more suitable, never more static and transcendent than in this film of two solitary beings: a man locked in his own prison and a woman caged in the golden cage of economic security.
The first scene shows us the girl's suicide in a static and unforgettable shot: the table that seems to collapse eternally on the balcony indicates that the girl has just jumped into the void and at the same time gives the sensation of an unfinished action, which It seems to stop in time.
Next the husband remembers before the corpse how he met her, fell in love with her, and saved/bought her.
The girl has had a past of economic hardship, of squalor; the boy has had a setback that has taught him how fragile prosperity is.
There is something of a hunted and trapped beast in Sanda's gaze. From there everything is mystery and conjecture in the marriage relationship.
Une femme douce is the great leap in Bresson's style towards his final maturity, that of works in color. Afterwards there will be no substantial purges.
I only have one scene left over: that awful representation of Hamlet, with its subsequent commentary, seems like a declaration of principles, an aesthetic creed enunciated without any elegance. An incomprehensible beginner's mistake in an author in full maturity.