A Gentle Woman (Robert Bresson, 1969)

The Bird Is Mortal

Amir Siadat

What can be understood from the sorrow and sadness of the mysterious character of A Gentle Woman? "Need" is probably the first word that comes to mind. She keeps coming to the man's store to pawn something and get some money. From the note she wants to advertise, it is clear that she is looking for job; A small and insignificant one, just to get by. She is satisfied with the least. She has lost her parents, and her relatives take her for granted. As far as it goes back to ancient patterns and fairy tales, during misery and misfortune, a man's affection can save a woman. Despite all this, she resists the man's marriage proposal - which would surely be the end of her poverty. In response to the man who reminded her that marriage is "the dream of millions of women", she says that she thinks about "something more than marriage" and points out to the man the monkeys that are jumping and climbing up and down the tree on the other side of the fence. This reminds us of the opening scenes of The Diary of a Country Priest: the fence that separates the monastery from the surrounding environment turns the ascetic solitude of the monk into a solitary confinement (specially in comparison with the passion of lovers in the green and simple area outside). Bresson's close-ups in return to the image of the man and the woman - who are involved in the idea of marriage - trap them in a cage; It's like the monkeys are free and the two are captive. Perhaps this reversed situation is an interpretation of the rebellious and restless nature of a woman who - contrary to the expectation of the man - is not like other "millions of women". A man who deals with calculation, weighing and exchanging and thinks that everything can be bought, his problem is that he can’t capture the soul of this woman. The woman's continuous rebellion against him in A Gentle Woman, as a thematic issue, has caused Dominique Sanda to fit less into Bresson's approach toward “models”, compared to other models. In other words, we can imagine a similar battle behind the scenes: the incompatibility of the rebel actress with the inviolable discipline of the author. Dominique Sanda - like Anne Wiazemsky or Marika Green and many others - was one of the traitors to the principle of "each model, only one role" and became a professional actress after A Gentle Woman. The film starts with the woman's suicide scene, and in fact, from the end, in order to - in similarity with A Man Escaped (and later The Devil Probably) - let "providence" dominate all the moments of the film and give the man's monologues the essence of confession. However, the film's narrative games, by juxtaposing the past and the present and summoning of the woman, have distorted the time boundaries to implicitly remind such living for her has no difference with death. Even in a single scene, time moves in sync with the man's speech: In one moment, we see the man narrating next to the lifeless body of a woman, and in another moment we see the living woman. The narration is limited to the perspective of the man and his information. In one or two scenes where the man is not the observer (for example, the scene of the woman singing in secret or the scene of her first encounter with the bed that she is going to separate from the man), the old servant was present and could convey what she witnessed to the man. But there is a scene which narrator can logically be none other than Bresson himself: the mysterious solitude of the woman before committing suicide. While the man left the house after reconciliation to make preparations for a trip, the camera takes the opportunity to record the strange loneliness of the woman. And this is the breaking point that separates Bresson's "cinematograph" from Dostoyevsky's "story" in parallel with the changing the way of the narrative and - subsequently - separating the woman from the house (and the man). The woman in Dostoyevsky's story has more clarity. Although the man calls her "always silent", but issues such as repeatedly emphasizing the woman's job application ads (which each time give more privilege to the employer and finally reach the statement "without pay, only for sleep and food") or the description of her relationship with her sly aunts, as well as the presence of a food vendor who is her suitor, have created a clearer picture of this fragile and sad personality. Far more important difference is the significant age difference of the couple in the story: a sixteen-year-old girl and a forty-one-year-old man. The age gap, which can be considered one of the obvious and main factors of a woman's distance from a man, has been reduced by at least ten years in Bresson's adaptation so that the viewer can look for more hidden and internal factors to understand the "separation".

Stillness, contentment, and the inherent ambiguity of the woman are already related to the art of cinematography, the silence of the scene, the ascetic style, and Bresson's minimalism; However, during the adaptation, this woman became more silent and closer to the lonely and mournful people of Bresson; To Joan of Arc and Mouchette, to priest of Ambricourt, to Agnes of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Jeanne of Pickpocket and Marie of Balthazar. It's as if the woman's innate connection with the art of cinematography has made her so favorable to this most principled author of cinema that she is ready to violate the general rule of the narrative for the sake of meeting him for the last time. It's as if the woman's rebellious nature has spread to the film as well. The moment of suicide returns this irregularity to the language of the image, because the representation of the woman breaking out of the suffocating constriction of the whole framed world (which is translated by the visual discipline and the stylized frames of Bresson) is itself the epitome of disorder: the door opens, the table collapses, the vase breaks, the wind howls and shakes the curtains; The body that fell from the balcony of the house disturbs the street, but a spirit is freed from imprisonment and flap joyfully in the form of a white shawl. The relation of the woman with the art of cinematography on the one hand, and her antagonism with the man on the other hand, allows us to see this couple as representatives of two different perceptions of cinema: one introverted and secretive, reticent and vague, deep, distant and indifferent to material things, and the other is extroverted and expressive, talkative, superficial and easy-going and preoccupied with money. It is not strange if the man claps for the performance of Hamlet in the theater sequence and the woman does not. This is an example of the same exaggerated and inelegant theater that Bresson criticized all through his life and tried to remove it from the cinema screen. After woman, returning home, is busy going through Shakespeare's text to find the manipulations of the performance, for a moment we think of her as the alternative of the filmmaker/theorist. Apart from the fact that all the scenes related to Hamlet are added by Bresson, the woman's connection with art and her exploratory concerns (she is often engaged in reading or visiting painting exhibitions or changing gramophone records or singing) in the story of the Russian writer has a much weaker display. Perhaps those inner and hidden factors in Berson's adaptation, beyond the age difference and external signs (for example, the quality of the relationship of men and women with money), should be found in the associations that carry spiritual and aesthetic implications. In that final solitude, the woman holds a cross and caresses it. Maybe the hope of the complete collapse of the relationship and the dream of liberation was the only thing that she lived for, and it seems that the sudden transformation of the man, his begging return and his will to restore this relationship also destroyed that ray of hope. After the reconciliation, she is lonelier than ever and feels more than ever that "God has abandoned her". The man/narrator in the film will not be aware of the woman's inner relationship and rituals with Christ. This is a secret between the woman, Bresson and the audience. In the story, instead of a cross, the woman carries a holy icon (the image of saint Mary) and holds that icon in her arms when she commits suicide. It is obvious that the man/narrator of the story will know about her spiritual secrets by seeing this icon in the hands of the body. The cross in the film finds a symbolic function from the very beginning when the woman brought it as a pledge: the man weighs it - which is made of gold - and takes it and returns the statue of Christ to the woman. Christ and his sufferings stay with the woman so that she will continue to find her own cross by stepping into the man's house and that house become a house of tensions. A prison from which it is impossible to escape.

The shots that show the woman through the man's eyes and through the porthole clearly recall similar frames from The Trial of Joan of Arc and Joan's solitude in her cell, the frequent opening and closing of the doors is reminiscent of A Man Escaped and the desire to escape from suffocation of the enclosed space appears in the motif of "conversation on the stairs", which also happens continuously in the Pickpocket. These frames and motifs have all given the house and life of this couple a prison-like effect. Apart from this, the existence of doors and windows that evoke boundaries with their intersecting lines, along with the gloomy and limited colors of the rooms (mostly brown and yellow) and most importantly, the connection of the store and the house (which symbolically links the rules of trade to the marital relations) has made a prison out of this life that has taken away the freedom of woman. The dispute arises from the fact that the woman violates the law of capital by paying an amount more than the real value of the mortgage to a customer. This is exactly what the man did to the woman before, but the difference should be found in the desire of the two. The ultimate purpose of the man's action still has an "investing" dimension: by paying money, he planted something to reap later (it can be said that the ultimate intention was to "buy" the woman's love). But the ultimate action that the woman performed to help the customer is apparently nothing but the action itself. Is money the cause of evil? This is a question that, Bresson clearly raises it in his last work, L'Argent, but can also be seen in A Gentle Woman. Isn't it the fact that the logic of capital somehow rules over all that dominance and the growing desire to conquer and possess - which finally brings the woman down from the balcony to the floor of street? And isn’t it just that the environmental illusions of The Devil Probably also arose from the heart of the industrial and capitalist world? It's as if the introverted filmmaker's gaze is more and more focused on concrete contemporary issues, and the more he advances, the darker and more hopeless he finds the outside world. In A Gentle Woman, human suffering is not limited to the inner space and married life. The outer context of the city also looks as dark and sterile. From Bresson's point of view, love and human attachments in modern society are invalid in Paris. His medium and close-up shots do not open a window toward freedom and do not see much difference between indoor and outdoor spaces. The outside is as cramped and suffocating as the inside. The sound of objects and machines in Bresson's Paris has made the silence of human relationships more visible. Apart from the fact that this city has nothing to do with the romantic Paris of Hollywood works, it also stands in front of the free and seductive image of Paris in the works of the New Wave. Paris in A Gentle woman is not the lively and fun Paris of 400 Blows, which is like a pleasant refuge in the face of internal spaces full of repressions and dos and don’ts. It should not be forgotten that the camera of the new wave filmmakers, by turning its back on the studio system, entered the heart of the streets of Paris from a framed and internal space, in order to record the passions in unplanned encounters. Therefore, it is not wrong to consider the boldness of urban spaces and reliance on Paris in Bresson's latest works as a reaction to the New Wave. Similarly, his becoming more radical in these works can’t be unrelated to the radicalism of the New Wave. It is as if those close-ups - which even in some scenes have left the upper body or the head of people outside the frame - are supposed to depict the city as depressed and emotionless in contrast to the passionate Paris in New Wave films, and against that poetic realism and Cinema verité dimension, create an abstracted Paris that looks like a big prison. A hostile idea reveals itself from the heart of the modern city: living in such a prison is nothing but constant suffering. So, you can ask why living? Is "the savior is lying in the grave"? Priest of Ambricourt, Mouchette, and Charles of The Devil Probably give a positive answer to this question. Although the dance of the woman's shawl in the sky recalls the flight of the bird at the end of The Trial of Joan of Arc (after the burning of Joan), death in A Gentle Woman also has a frightening appearance: a close-up of the woman's coffin. Before the absolute darkness engulfs the scene, it is plunged into a horrifying silence and no sound can be heard except for the tightening of the screws of the coffin. Such a silent ending here is supposed to reduce the "salvation" previously made possible by the glory of music (Mozart's music at the end of A Man Escaped, Jean-Baptiste's music at the end of The Pickpocket and Monteverdi's music at the end of Mouchette) to "passing away". The film of contradictions ends with two conflicting images of death; The first one (dance of the shawl) is the legacy of the presence of "God’s mercy" in the previous works, and the second one (the coffin) carries the darkness and silence that will eventually lead to the destruction in The Devil Probably and endless dimness in L'Argent.