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.
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.
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