A Gentle Woman

The film opens with a suicide: a young woman goes off a balcony. Her husband keeps watch over the body and begins to talk. He narrates the marriage from the start: how they met, the pawnshop, her books and the theatre, the silence between them. Across the monologue he tries to justify himself and cannot. The subject is not the suicide but the impossibility of explanation. The man recounts what happened in order and can never say why; the film does not help him and never enters the woman's interior. The form is Bresson's mature method: performers speak without emphasis, gestures are pared down, sounds are isolated. This is his first film in colour, and colour is nowhere used as decoration. The source is Dostoevsky's story A Gentle Creature, which Bresson moved from nineteenth-century Russia to contemporary Paris. Dominique Sanda entered cinema with this film; she had no acting experience, in keeping with his preference for non-professionals. Guy Frangin plays the husband. Who it is for: viewers who like Bresson and the cold form of literary adaptation. Who it is not for: anyone wanting emotional return; the film withholds feeling deliberately and keeps the viewer outside.