Bresson’s earliest “official” Dostoevsky adaptation – of the short story A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya, 1876) – transposes the setting of the St Petersburg story to Paris in the late 1960s. The only real marriage film in the director’s career, it begins with the suicide of young Ellen (Sanda) and moves on to the memories of her husband Luc (Guy Frang), who goes through the stages of their relationship – although the director denied the existence of a flashback structure: “They are not flashbacks, but something else – encounters between death and life.”
Dostoyevsky’s themes are responsibility and guilt; Bresson’s are man’s doubts, communication problems, secrets, silences and unanswered questions. The director’s first colour film is a chromatic creation in various shades of green, brown, gold and white, originally inspired by one of the greatest screen debuts of all time by an actress who was only sixteen at the start of production: “I started with the colour of Sanda’s skin and harmonised everything accordingly.”
The movements of Elle’s soul remain a mystery in the marital war of attrition, and Sanda’s bewilderingly ambiguous role, at once enchanting and distant, is captivating in its mystery. The original brilliance of the myth is retained in Bresson’s reduced vision, and the conclusion is no sweeter for it: only death can achieve all that life fails to give.
Lauri Timonen