FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Robert Bresson - Une Femme Douce (engl. subt.) 

Bresson's sparse and off-putting adaptation of Dostoevsky's short story Krotkaya doesn't look like a film that was released in 1969. It could just as easily have been made in the 1940s or 1950s. In short, Bresson didn't look like the others in the late 60s either. He remained true to himself. A Gentle Woman was his first colour film, but the colours seem muted and darkened. Dominique Sanda plays Elle; the wife of a pawnbroker. Unexpectedly, she takes her own life. She jumps from the balcony of her Paris flat, leaving no suicide note. Luc (Guy Frangin), the widower, shows no emotion. His face resembles that of a mask. It probably expresses what characterised the entire time of their marriage: suppressed emotions. While he sits with the maid in front of the laid-out corpse, he explains his marital relationship to her. A narrative that is almost eerily interlaced with the present through flashbacks. Sometimes Elle is dead, then alive again. "Douce" = gentle I don't find Elle. She never smiles, With a cold stare, Unreconciled. She is the victim of Luc's controlling jealousy. Elle meets Luc as one of his clients. Ironically, she pawns him a crucifix, the value of which he assesses with a glance in his usual routine. Luc makes no comment on the value of this crucifix. He removes the plastic image of Jesus Christ before weighing the golden cross. Elle's suicide is no great mystery. In a way, she pawned herself to Luc. Elle pawned her soul in order to have a marriage of material comfort. Maybe that's why she spends so much time at the zoo, watching the captive animals? Sometimes Elle tries to consume culture at Luc's side. Unsuccessfully, despite the fact that Hamlet certainly arouses her interest. (We may transfer Hamlet's advice not to exaggerate to Bresson's actors, who never convey emotion). But while Luc remains reduced entirely to the tied-up bourgeois type, we glimpse something wild, unbridled in Elle - which, of course, never gets out. Elle is in turmoil against her marriage, marriage itself and her entire existence. Anyone who now asks me, as a video store owner, which film comes closest to this? "Belle De Jour." In A Gentle Woman, however, we don't experience an erotic turmoil, but a spiritual one. Elle's spiritual crisis discharges in suicide, the transcendent moment of the film. That is why it is difficult to establish a motivation for this act, because that would be all too worldly. When Luc and the maid sit before Elle's dead body, it is a dark, unforgiving outcome. It corresponds to Elle's life.