The Cinematheque

“An eerie crystalline work, a serious affirmation within a story of suicide.”

Manny Farber, Artforum

Based on a story by Dostoevsky (as with Bresson’s next film, Four Nights of a Dreamer), Une femme douce is Bresson’s first film in colour and marks the stand-out screen debut of Dominique Sanda, a Bresson non-pro who went on to have a major career in European cinema, including leading roles in Bertolucci’s The Conformist and 1900. A disconcerting told-in-flashback tale of the failure of love and the walls that separate us, the film concerns a materialistic Parisian pawnbroker struggling to understand why his free-spirited young wife—the ​“gentle woman” of the title played by Sanda—committed suicide. (Suicide was an increasingly prevalent theme for Bresson.) The director’s use of colour, a palette of almost exclusively blues and greens, is characteristically expert. This haunting, poetic, and mysterious work is often cited as the director’s most sensual and secular film.

In French with English subtitles

“Colour in no way lessened his ability to create a totally personal vision … The progress of the couple’s relationship is beautifully captured without recourse to psychological ​‘explanations.’”

Roy Armes, film scholar

“Une femme douce belongs among the greater Bresson films.”

Roger Greenspun, The New York Times