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.'