May 25: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945 -- Robert Bresson)

★★★

I don’t think Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is the minimalist Robert Bresson whose influence fed into the rise of the New Wave.  This film is lavish from the get-go with Hélène’s well-appointed home, fuzzy poodle and high-40s hair and clothes.  Even outdoors, the settings include the ornate cascades of water in the fountains of the Bois as well as that outside Agnès’ apartment, and there are spacious compositions of people walking leisurely in the park.

There is also a theatrical quality to the film as we cut from one stage set to the other, watching the characters talk over dinner or in their respective apartments.  The theatrical melodrama peaks when Agnès faints at the end of the film as her cabaret background is revealed at the wedding and her soft-focus image fills the screen surrounded by billows of fabric.  This shot looks like it would be in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and Beast rather than in a Robert Bresson film, which is perhaps no coincidence since Cocteau co-wrote this screenplay and was closely involved in the film.  For all its good qualities, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne doesn’t look like the later films that would define Bresson.

But the movie has some really good qualities.  Hélène is one of the most evil film heroine’s I’ve seen.  Played by María Casares, Hélène has a long, angular face that comes to a point at her chin and resembles that of a praying mantis; her behavior does as well.  Hélène exploits the poverty of Agnès and her mother and manipulates them to exact her revenge on the lover who has jilted her, Jean.  And that lover, Jean, is a dumb victim who follows the lead of his heart, trusting Hélène completely as the woman works to destroy him.  Hélène is a villainess for the ages.

Meanwhile, we have great sympathy for Agnès and her mother,  who have fallen into dire straits and are selling their furniture as their standard of living declines.  Agnès, in particular, has given up her dreams of ballet and instead dances in a cabaret and private dance salon run by her mother.  The two are poetic realist characters who are on course to meet a bad fate and passively move at the orders of Hélène.  The world slowly closes in on Agnès as she finds she can’t hold a job because of her earlier disgraceful job, and she seems to be destroyed on the day of her wedding when Hélène reveals Agnès’ sordid past to the hapless groom.  But Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne isn’t poetic realism, and 40s melodrama reasserts itself to rescue Agnès at the last moment.

While Les Dames isn’t where I think Bresson goes in later films, the little I know of him suggests that there might be some anticipation of his future work here.  For one, I think he moves toward lower class characters in trouble in future films, so Agnès and her mother preview this interest to some extent.   I also know that sound is an important element of Bresson’s film-making, and I notice Bresson using sound to create space we can’t see in this film.  Early on, for example, we hear jazz as Hélène gets out of her car at Agnès’ apartment, and the music doesn’t correspond to anything we see nor is it appropriate to the action as background.  It continues as Hélène walks into the building and rises in volume as she open the door to Agnès’.  Through the entire sequence, we’re interested in the function of the inappropriate music until it’s finally given its diegetic rationale, but the moments leading up to that explanation are cinematically modern, perhaps anticipating what we see in Bresson’s later career.

I’ve been seeing a lot of reference to Bresson this year, and I’ve been meaning to get to his films for a while.  My friend Lou is up for watching several Bressons, and since I don’t see Bresson coming to blu-ray any time soon, we decided to jump in.  Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne looks like a good place to start, enjoyable in its own right and a starting point for a fast overview of an important director I know little about.