obsessed beings
by Douglas Messerli
Robert
Bresson and Jean Cocteau (screenplay), Robert Bresson (director) Les Dame du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne) /
1945
Les Dames du
Bois de Boulogne
(The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne),
is a wonderful Robert Bresson film that doesn’t seem at all like a Bresson
film. In his second feature Bresson—although he had remarkable cinematic
abilities—still did not quite understand, it is apparent, precisely who he was.
The film, a highly melodramatic work, with a truly literary text by Jean
Cocteau, starred the great María Casares and the noted actor Paul Bernard
(unlike the remainder of Bresson films which used unknowns as actors),
performing—both of them in their high dramatic extravagance—in a text based on
an incident in Denis Diderot masterwork, Jacques
le fataliste.

Hélène (the wealthy and vengeful Casares)
and Jean (the weak, but sophisticated Bernard) have joined themselves in a
marriage of the mind, a commitment to each other that still permits them other
dalliances, but is based, so she
supposes, on a sincere promise of faithfulness. A late night concert with
another male friend reveals to Hélène that her relationship with Jean is not
necessarily what she perceives it. As her friend observes, “There is no such
thing as love, only proofs of love,” of which Hélène has little evidence.
Encountering her “lover” after the event, she tests him, suggesting that,
despite their pledge of love, her feelings have grown cooler, to which Jean
almost leaps into agreement, declaring that his own feelings are quite similar,
asking her for his “freedom”:
I give you back your freedom, and you’ll give me mine!
The scheming Hélène has her answer: her
lover is only too eager to leave her, to which she seemingly demurs, planning
at that instant her reaction; “I’ll have my revenge!”
That revenge involves a somewhat innocent
dancer and her mother, who both once lived near her country estate. Since those
apparent halcyon days, mother and daughter have moved to Paris so that Agnès
might explore a dancing career. But she is no gifted ballerina, now appearing
in a cabaret, singing while accomplishing great cartwheels, and helping to
further support her career with paid evenings with her many admirers. In short,
she has become a kind of prostitute.
With
the cruel sweep of a descending blade, Hélène, presenting herself as a kind of
“angel,” inserts herself into the lives of this troubled duo, offering to
remove them from their conditions of destitute sexuality, putting them up in a
comfortable—if not glamorous—apartment, and warning the mother to help protect
her daughter from further moral defilement. The two appreciate the act, and
despite the evil intentions of Hélène, she is, in some senses, superficially
“honest,” insisting that they remain above and apart of the sexual world they
once inhabited, while at the same time arranging a meeting with the daughter
and mother with her former lover, Jean, at the Bois de Boulogne.
That meeting has its expected effects,
Jean falling deeply in love with whom he perceives as the absolutely innocent
young woman, Agnès, who, described by Hélène as “impeccable,” will have nothing
to do with him. As he becomes more and more obsessed with the young girl—a
theme one might almost imagine in Proust—Hélène increasingly encourages the
women, in what seems like concerned familial advice to stay clear of him.
Knowing both figures well, however, she perceives the eventual result. Both she
and her former lover are obsessed individuals. Giving up just enough
information to bring the two together, Hélène determines their ultimate
encounter, the mother—in one of many of Cocteau’s brilliant dialogical
moments—informing Jean “I can’t ask you in. Come in.”
His entry ultimately results in Agnès’
acceptance of his offer to marry her, despite her suspicions of Hélène’s
intentions. She cannot help but be delighted that, given her past, that she
might find fulfillment in a relationship with the wealthy and sophisticated
Jean.
Of course, Hélène is not yet finished with
torture of the figures upon whom she has focused, warning Agnès to say nothing
of her previous life until after her
marriage, and then, gossiping into her former lover’s ear about Agnès’ at the
very moment the ceremony has come to an end. In a grand dramatic gesture, she
has invited most of Agnès’ fomer lovers to the affair. Jean, ever the coward,
attempts to escape, as Hélène, ever the torturer, entraps him by the placement
of her car. Agnès—the weak of heart, and the true “angel” of this piece—faints,
having already suggested that she can no longer endure serious physical
activity.
What might convince one that this is
indeed a Bresson movie, and not a film by the equally talented Max Ophuls, is
revealed, however—once Agnès has fallen into her death faint, with Jean
returning, insisting that he still he still loves her, and begging her to come
back to life, a faint smile upon her face suggesting that she not only has
heard him but will, in fact, survive to rectify and salve the evil intents of Hélène—a
true Bresson work, salvation at its center.
What we perceive in this brilliant film
is that Bresson was working through a more traditional form in order to determine
what he would soon after alter to create an indelible new way of thinking about
filmmaking. But even here, in Les Dame du
Bois de Boulogne, we recognize him already as a great cinematographer.
Los Angeles,
August 29, 2013
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