LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE

This early masterpiece from Robert Bresson is just as austere as any of the films that followed it but his use of professional actors gives the film a kind of distance, an almost Hollywood gloss and you can almost see in Maria Casares' magnificent performance as the vindictive Helene a touch of Bette Davis. Bresson did the adaptation from a book by Diderot but Cocteau supplied the terse, pointed dialogue where every word counts and where every word could be used as a weapon.

It's a tale of revenge. Jean has fallen out of love with Helene but she decides to trap him by telling him first that it is she who has fallen out of love with him. When he tells her he feels the same way she takes her revenge, a woman scorned and all that, by seeking out a sad little strumpet, Agnes, introducing her as a friend and then organizing it so that Jean falls in love with her. She then plans on telling Jean he has given himself to a whore. It's a chilly, almost savage film that takes a novelettish situation and turns into something approaching tragedy. The director draws superb performances from everyone, not just Casares in what may be her greatest role but also from Paul Bernard as Jean, Elina Labourdette as the unfortunate Agnes and Lucienne Bogaert as her complicit mother. One wonders if Hollywood had remade the film would any studio or any director be so single-minded, so absolute in their portrayal of evil. An astonishing film.