Review - A Gentle Woman (1969)

As chromatically vibrant as it is hopelessly bleak, Robert Bresson's first color film from 1969 features much of the human misery one expects from the French auteur, but little in the way of spiritual recompense. Adapted from a short story by Dostoyevsky, it is an account of the toxic marriage between a parsimonious pawnbroker (Guy Frangin) and his young wife (Dominique Sanda), given by him in the moments following her sudden and unexpected suicide. He details initial encounters, their union for purely pragmatic reasons (she is poor and idealistic, he desires a sex object-cum-pupil) and the grinding daily existence that impels her to break free in most extreme fashion. Bresson's ravishing new color palette, seemingly tailored to suit Sanda's radiant, green-eyed visage, offers little respite from his oppressively grim take on modern matrimony. Like the inept production of Hamlet that features in one extended scene, he equates it to a poorly acted farce, one that masks brutal cycles of emotional blackmail, economic dependance and objectification. The correlation between financial and metaphysical bondage is not a new subject for the director, nor is suicide, a theme he first broached with 1967's 'Mouchette.' What's new, or rather what's conspicuously missing, is the transformative grace that accompanies the self-destructive act. The existentialist notion of suicide without salvation - closer to Camus than Dostoyevsky - animates this brooding, visually beautiful work, and would permeate another of Bresson's late-period masterpieces, 'The Devil Probably.'

Review - Bay of Angels (1963)

In much the same way that his debut 'Lola' was influenced by an earlier film - Max Ophüls' 'Lola Montes' - Jacques Demy's second feature draws inspiration from another, far more unlikely source: Robert Bresson's 'Pickpocket.' For roughly the first quarter of its runtime, everything from the grey Parisian backdrop to the stolid protagonist (Claude Mann, in Bressonian dark suit) who descends into a disreputable demimonde (the world of high stakes gambling) recalls the redemptive thrust of the austere 1959 masterwork. (There's even an intricate roulette tutorial akin to 'Pickpocket's thieving lessons, and several shots of currency being counted and exchanged that hint at the pervasive, corrupting influence of money.) When the action shifts to Nice, however, Bresson's severe spell is broken. Just as Mann cannot stifle a smile when he meets and falls for Jeanne Moreau's blonde beauty, a "professional" roulette player who doesn't know when to quit, Demy can't help but yield his camera more poetically when faced with the romantic vistas of the French Riviera. Subjected to his dreamy gaze, beachfront hotels ooze elegance, palm trees sway invitingly, and the lamps lining the beach glow effervescently, as does Moreau, clad in all white. Demy's stylistic opulence and characteristically bittersweet themes beat out Bresson's profound preoccupations; hence, the parallel between the euphoric highs and ignominious lows of a gambling spree, and the vertiginous emotional trajectory of an unexpected love affair.

Review - Los Olvidados (1950)

Luis Buñuel exposes the desperate, dog-eat-dog existence of impoverished street children in this indelible 1950 drama, an early gem from his fruitful Mexican period. Set in the slums of the capitol city, it concerns a gang of delinquents, the titular "forgotten ones." Their pastimes range from rough-housing and staying out late to relieving cripples and blind beggars of their cash. Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) wants to do right by his aggrieved mother (Stella Inda), but is lead astray by El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), a diabolical older boy whose larger physical build, snake-like cunning and total lack of scruples make him a natural leader, in the Darwinian sense. Try as Pedro does to straighten out and overcome his dismal lot, he cannot dodge the fiendish, indefatigable Jaibo, or evade his own tragic fate.

Sidestepping the clichés of the "juvenile delinquent film" - cloying sentimentality and a neat resolution via altruistic intervention - and the melodramatic excess typical of Mexican productions of the period, Buñuel's account strikes a distinctive balance between psychologically-charged realism and the surrealism he helped popularize twenty years earlier. In the fashion of the so-called neorealist films that dominated European cinemas at the time, the staging is completely authentic, shot on location in the most wretched districts of Mexico City with locals serving as extras, but here there's little of the neorealists' moralistic messaging. Cruelties, from child abuse to murder, occur regularly, and are treated by the camera as they are by the characters, as perfectly natural acts that will be repeated again and again endlessly, marked only by a cut or fade to black.

Buñuel does occasionally tread into the realm of the metaphysical, and revert to his usual phantasmagoric tricks; there's a haunting dream sequence that inverts 'Zéro de conduite's ecstatic slow-motion revolt, and a primal symbolism that runs throughout, every chicken, pigeon and mongrel dog acquiring a latent significance. Still, the focus remains on the very real lives of the hapless youngsters. Thanks to the director's utterly truthful approach, we may not pity or pass judgement on the boys, but we're not likely to forget them either.