Bresson's Gentleness
[Une Femme Douce] commences with the [heroine's] suicide. What draws us on, like [her] husband, is the desire to know why. But to know why in Bresson (as is not the case in Dostoevski), we have to watch intently everything that happens because nothing is explained and even the explainer is an item to be fathomed. Many viewers find Bresson cold and remote, but this coldness may be only a reflection of their own passivity. If you can be excited by the search for understanding, you can be excited by Bresson.
So Bresson forces total concentration…. Only at the very end of each film does Bresson release us from our hush of contemplation with a shock that sums up what we've seen, as when bubbles emerge from the river in which the heroine of Mouchette has drowned herself and a blast of the Magnificat admits that death alone is victory for such a life. (p. 312)
The wife is not what her husband thinks her to be, yet when she almost embodies his erroneous image, her integrity is shattered and she can only die. The husband is brutal, not so much when he seeks to possess his hard-eyed wife as when he seeks to make amends for having sought possession. Watching their marriage progress, we feel a growing terror, because opposites merge and solutions turn out to be worse than the problems they solve….
The film's clear point is that tragedy can be comprehended as a process, while still evading our need to fathom motives and fix blame. Therefore, Bresson uses his cinematic means—framing, editing, dialogue, acting—to achieve an even emphasis that precludes abstract summation. Whatever inspires these people can only be inferred from their laconic utterances and meager gestures. But this very meagerness—which we are made to experience—comes as close as anything can to being the source of their solitude. Both Dostoevski's story and Bresson's film light up the distance between two human souls (although Bresson magnifies the distance by giving us a fuller portrayal of the wife). Dostoevski, however, attributes the distance to a fundamental human perversity; Bresson links it to a world without spiritual force. (p. 314)
Many artists would depict a desolation of spirit so profound through more striking dramatization, but Bresson would think this a mistake; he includes in Une Femme Douce a scene that illustrates his aesthetic. When the couple see Hamlet at the theater, the husband is impressed but the wife doesn't join in his applause. Returning home, she explains why, by running to a volume of Shakespeare to read lines that had been eliminated in the performance only so that the actors could get away with shouting and gesticulation. The lines come from Hamlet's advice to the players (in a French translation) and among them is the veritable motto of Bresson's art:
in the torrent, the tempest, the whirlwind one must always be moderate and acquire even a certain gentleness.
Like the wife herself, Bresson shows that gentleness of manner does not deny inner ferocity. For the spectator who can match the film's concentration with his own, Bresson, by rigorously controlling passion, inspires it. (p. 315)
Charles Thomas Samuels, "Bresson's Gentleness," in The American Scholar (copyright by the Estate of Charles Thomas Samuels; reprinted by permission), Vol. 40, No. 2, Spring, 1971, pp. 309-15.
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