SUBJECTS

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881 -- Film and video adaptations, Man-woman relationships -- Drama, Marriage -- Drama

Une femme douce

(A Gentle Creature)

Digital Restoration

featuring

Dominique Sanda, Guy Frangin, Jeanne Lobre, Claude Ollier,

The suicide of a young wife begins this simple, inscrutable story; afterward, her pawnbroker husband relates the history of their marriage. But his narration necessarily fails to explain the woman whose life we see in flashback, underlining the ultimate privacy of death. The actors deliver their impassioned Dostoyevskian lines with a wonderfully daft affectlessness; at moments, the direction reaches a level of sublime absurdity reminiscent of late Buñuel. Mysteriously resonant, too, are the quiet, lucid surfaces that fill the interiors of the director’s first color picture—the pawnbroker’s dark, burnished table, over which the couple first meet; or Dominique Sanda’s pallid face, only slightly more animate in life than in death; and the luminous lid of her coffin, whose closing marks the film’s end.

Juliet Clark
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Robert Bresson
Based On
  • “A Gentle Creature” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cinematographer
  • Ghislain Cloquet
Language
  • French
  • English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 88 mins
Source
  • Paramount Releasing
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Une femme douce documents  

Une femme douce (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1999

The poetry of precision: the films of Robert Bresson (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 1998

Robert Bresson (press kit), Pacific Film Archive, 1998

Une femme douce (distributor materials), New Yorker Films, 1995

The films of Robert Bresson (distributor materials), New Yorker Films, 1993

Une femme douce (press release), Surf Theatres, 1971

Bresson's gentleness (article), American Scholar, Charles Thomas Samuels, 1971

Bresson's "Une femme douce" (review), A.E., 1971

Une femme douce (review), Villager, The, John Broeck, 1971

New films (review), William Wolf, 1971

Displaying 10 of 28 publicly available documents.


View all Une femme douce documentation on CineFiles.