The Means of Obession

Before losing focus in its final scene, Robert Bresson's A Gentle Woman (Une Femme Douce) is a controlled, deeply ironic tale of obsession or, to be more specific, the means of obsession. Modernized from a story by Doestoevsky, the film is framed by its central image: a white shawl, with metaphors-in-tow, drifting slowly in the air after a beautiful woman (Dominique Sanda) throws herself off a building. In between, her pawnbroker husband (Guy Frangin) narrates their relationship through flashback, futilely attempting to understand why she did it. The man reveals the details of their relationship with the precision and order of a good storyteller, with each event cleanly and logically linked to the next. But as the film progresses, we end up learning less about this enigmatic woman and more about the narrator's own hang-ups and neuroses.

In adapting Doestoevsky, Bresson found his perfect match. Both deal with outcasts whose vision of the world is particularly obsessive and myopic. The reader/viewer gets the peculiar sensation of seeing incidents unfold from a wildly skewed perspective. If it's possible for a film to be told in the first person, A Gentle Woman would be a fine example or, for that matter, so would A Man Escaped (1956) or Pickpocket (1959), as Bresson strips the tasks of breaking out of prison and lifting billfolds, respectively, to their bare essentials. The task of loving the woman (no name is assigned to any of the characters) is no less deliberate for the pawnbroker. His courtship is so free of spontaneity, we see how awkward and desperate his attempts are to be "normal." Like any good businessman, he decides on who he wants, acquires her and does whatever's necessary to keep her, as if she's something pretty to mount on the wall. His desire for love has nothing to do with passion or even a mild affection, but a compulsion to be just like everyone else.

Rather than dabbling in the banality of pop psychology, Bresson's tone throughout is cool and ironic-- the events leading up to the woman's suicide give the impression of inevitability, but never tragedy. One can see how Paul Schrader (who wrote about Bresson in his thesis paper on transcendentalism) worked a similar relationship into his script for "Taxi Driver" (1976), when Cybill Shepherd's untouchable blonde confronts Robert De Niro's character and his pathological quest for normalcy. The decision to cast Dominique Sanda, a 20-year old model at the time, was a pointed one. Sanda is inexpressive, even inanimate in the role and its important to Bresson's schematic plot that she remain distant. There's little suggestion as to why she stays with the pawnbroker or why she takes up with him in the first place.

The camera catches all of the important moments in a "normal" relationship-- their first encounter, the offering of an engagement ring, their awkward consummation-- with a surgeon's precision. The pawnbroker often fools himself into thinking he's capable of love, but his resolve is unconvincing. In a clever way, "A Gentle Woman" parodies our preconceptions about how love should work.

For the final scene, Bresson chooses to break from the pawnbroker's point-of-view to show the moments before the woman commits suicide. The ending is meant to be transcendental, as she frees herself from being defined by the pawnbroker. Since Bresson never attempts to understand her motives until this point, the ending is aesthetically interesting but fails as tragedy. To present her suicide as a form of liberation is bold and unexpected, but without emotional context, we remain detached. It's as if Bresson finished one movie and tried to start another, showing the same events for the other angle. The result is two stories battling one another: the brilliant, self-contained piece tracing the manners of obsession and the clipped short feature about its shattered idol. They only come together in that central image, the white shawl dancing through the air, holding within it the pawnbroker's query about his wife's suicide and the answer he will never understand.

-- Scott Tobias