This 1969 film, entitled Une Femme Douce in French, has been variously translated into English as A Gentle Woman or A Gentle Creature.

Historical Background: A Gentle Woman (1969) was the ninth film by French director Robert Bresson, who was such a meticulous worker that he completed only thirteen full-length films over a forty year career. A Gentle Woman was preceded by Angels of the Streets (1943), Ladies of the Park (1945), Diary of a Country Priest (1950), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966), and Mouchette (1967). The last three of those all had their premieres at the New York Film Festival, where critics typically fawned over Bresson's works even as the public ignored them. Following A Gentle Woman (1969), Bresson made just four additional films: Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Lancelot of the Lake (1974), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983).

Bresson's films are stylistically and thematically difficult for many viewers. Stylistically, his films are typically static and austere, with minimal dialog. The performers are usually amateurs who have been specifically instructed and trained to suppress both vocal inflections and facial expressiveness. It's a minimalist approach that requires viewers to pay close attention to small nuances. Thematically, Bresson is preoccupied with moral, religious, or existential issues, at least by intent. As his career progressed and his own depression deepened, he increasingly confused psychiatric issues with existential ones, as many intellectuals with mental health problems do. That confusion is evident in A Gentle Woman and, even more so, in The Devil, Probably. Most Bresson films culminate in a spiritualized moment of transcendence or escape, presented as ascension into a state of grace. While such moments may be uplifting, in a sense, when they take the form of a martyrdom (e.g., Joan of Arc or the donkey Balthazar), an escape from imprisonment (e.g., A Man Escaped), or the discovery of attachment (e.g., Pickpocket), it is unfortunate and erroneous to depict suicides brought about by depression as moments of grace, as Bresson seems to do in at least three films. There are better ways to escape the pain of psychiatric depression than suicide. My objection to the glorification of suicide is not the theological one of the Catholic Church, but a rational humanistic one.

The Story: A Gentle Woman begins with the suicide of Elle (Dominique Sanda), who leaps from the balcony of the upper-story apartment that she shares with her husband, Luc (Guy Frangin). The background of this suicide is then told by flashback, through Luc speaking to the maid, Anna (Jeanne Lobre), as the pair stands by the bed where the body of Elle has been laid out.

Luc had first met Elle, a poor orphan, when she came into the pawnshop where he worked to sell some of her possessions. Although Elle does some work as a maid for a bourgeois family, she spends her wages on books and needs additional money to survive. She returns to the pawnshop periodically and Luc begins to take notice, struck by her beauty and puzzling demeanor. Finally, Elle brings her last possessions to the shop, including a crucifix, with a gold cross. Luc attempts to pay her more than the gold's true value but Elle declares that she cannot be bought.

Luc pursues her relentlessly. Elle declares, "You don't want love. You want me to agree to marry you." Elle asks Luc not to follow her home because the people whom she works for are sinister. Luc persists, saying, "Say yes and you can leave here forever." Elle finally agrees.

Their marriage is a struggle from the beginning. The two are poorly matched and each has psychological problems. Luc is calculating, materialistic, and insecure. Elle suffers from melancholia and affective blunting. There is very little communication between them and virtually no understanding of their interpersonal difficulties. They take trips to the theater (for Hamlet), the natural history museum, and the zoo, but Elle merely discovers new "reasons" for despondency at each venue. In reality, Elle is manifesting many of the features of major depression, including apathy, lethargy, low self-esteem, psychomotor retardation, and thoughts of suicide (five of the eight symptoms of major depression, of which only four are required for diagnosis). Elle is physically beautiful and, initially, the one part of their relationship that seems to click for both of them is the sexual aspect. Like many a man married to a beautiful woman, Luc starts to experience feelings of jealousy, which are compounded by Elle's inability to express feelings of love or affection for him. Elle is deathly afraid of attachment, so Luc's expressions of possessiveness toward her merely exacerbate her urges for freedom and escape. Elle's emotions are blunted because the feelings she does experience are painful ones. A person whose emotions are blunted can neither give love nor accept it.

One day, Luc sticks a handgun in his coat pocket and goes looking for Elle, convinced that she's having an affair. He comes across her in a car with a young man, but, to her credit, he overhears her rejecting the man's advances. Back in their apartment, he leaves the gun sitting on a table and pretends to be sleeping. Elle picks up the gun, cocks it, and puts in up to Luc's face, but does not fire. She simply doesn't have enough emotional intensity for a crime of passion. Instead, she sinks into a deep despondency and is bedridden for months. Winter comes and goes, they occasionally walk together, but usually in complete silence. She continues to show no emotion and seldom even looks at her husband. Occasionally, she weeps out of shame, but is otherwise simply listless.

Luc makes a final effort to break through her wall of isolation. He suggests they go away and declares his interest in making a paradise for her. At first, she doesn't respond, but then weeps and begs him not to torment her. "And I was thinking you'd leave me," she says. Later, in a rare moment of conversation, Elle declares, while reading a book about birds, "Every bird is predisposed to its characteristic song." She has convinced herself that despondency is an essential part of her nature. "Can one change?" she asks. "Completely," he says, if "you will let me adore you, worship you." She can't, of course, because attachment means emotion, and, for Elle, emotion means pain. "I want something else," she says, meaning death. She declares, "I will be a faithful wife. I shall respect you." As he kisses her, she hugs him without feeling.

Luc goes for a walk. Elle fingers her gold cross and puts on her shawl. She sits briefly on the corner of her bed. She goes to the balcony door and then retreats. She proceeds to the mirror and gives herself a fleeting half-smile. She goes to the balcony door again, goes out, and jumps from atop a table, over the railing, to her death. Her shawl drifts softly to the ground.

Themes: Gentle people are those who lack any tendency toward violent affect, but Elle's affective blunting is really much broader than the term "gentle" would suggest. Bresson is using it poetically, here, rather than literally. Elle is too apathetic to be aggressive, but also lacks passion, is unable to give or accept affection, and shrinks from the very idea of attachment. Luc's needs in the relationship are diametrically opposed to those of Elle. He needs reassurance of her love (which she cannot give) to soothe his jealous tendencies and wants to worship and adore her (which she cannot accept). Luc says, "Do you know what it is to suffer with such a gentle woman? Beautiful woman? It's a rending, burning agony."

Intelligence provides little if any protection against depressive tendencies; it only misleads those suffering from depression as to the cause of their despondency. Intelligent people often convince themselves that their depression is a natural consequence of their ability to accurately perceive various terrible aspects of human existence that others are too blind or dishonest to acknowledge. See Bergman's film Scenes from a Marriage for another example of this phenomenon. At the museum of natural history, Elle finds new reason to be depressed from the observation that the bone structure of humans is not all that different from that of animals. At the art museum, she is similarly dejected to discover the similarity between her own body and paintings of nude women done over several centuries. At the theater, she is distressed when she finds that the players have omitted a passage from Hamlet's speech that ends, "for in the very torrent, tempest, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance." That line could be understood as a rationale for the clinical phenomenon called "affective blunting," which Elle manifests in extreme degree. In fact, the very acting style that Bresson always imposed on his "models" could be described as enforced affective blunting. Bresson himself became increasingly depressed as his life progressed. One wonders how different his films might have been had Prozac® or Zoloft® existed at the time.

There's a fair amount of nonsense written about this film by various reviewers. Since Bresson doesn't make his messages explicit, there's plenty of room for viewers to hang themselves. One reviewer calls Elle "passionate" and another describes her as a "gentle philosopher" with refined "powers of sensitivity and social scrutiny." Elle's blunted affect is precisely the opposite of being "passionate" and her sensitivities and scrutiny are nihilistic precisely because she is clinically depressed.

There is no grace in suicide as escape from despondency and Bresson does us all a disservice to suggest otherwise. Today, the vast majority of cases of major depression can be effectively treated with either drugs or psychotherapy or a combination of the two. Luc wanted to help his wife (partly so as to help himself to her love), but he lacked both clinical skills and understanding of psychology. Throughout most of their marriage, he had her body but could not have her soul and that restriction on the relationship was made permanent when her soul finally fluttered away with her shawl. "Open your eyes for only a second," Luc had pleaded before shutting the coffin and turning the screws, but she was already gone.

Production Values: The script for this film was based loosely on a Dostoevski novella, but Bresson took only the basics of the original and changed the entire import of the story. In the Dostoevski version, the emphasis was entirely on the incompatibility between husband and wife while in Bresson's treatment, it is nothing less than existence itself from which Elle is recoiling. Bresson is a master at suggesting psychological or philosophical issues through images and ordinary transactions. A long empty corridor becomes a symbol of isolation or detachment while the pawning of possessions for just a fraction of their real value establishes an element of guilt on both sides of the subsequent relationship between Elle and Luc. In a Bresson film, the mere hint of a smile to oneself in a mirror serves as an indication of final resignation. A Gentle Woman was Bresson's first film in color and it is very attractive, not least of all because Dominque Sanda is a lovely creature. As always, Bresson uses mostly preexisting classical music for the soundtrack. In this case, it is music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Henry Purcell. There's also some original music by Jean Wiener.

If you want to get an idea of the impact of Bresson's performance requirements on actors and actresses, just contrast Sanda's performance here in A Gentle Woman with her performance just a year later in The Conformist, where she highlights her sumptuous beauty with exuberance and wily coquettishness. You can also check out her later work in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971) and 1900 (1976). Sanda was born in 1948 in Paris, so she was just twenty-one when A Gentle Woman was released. Her co-star, Guy Frangin, was an amateur and this film is his only acting credit.

Bottom-Line: If Bresson's intent was to characterize depression as an existential issue rather than a clinical one, as he did later in The Devil, Probably, then he's just plain wrong and misleading his viewers, but since Bresson doesn't show his hand fully, it may only be that viewers are themselves imagining existential rationales for what is really nothing more than depression. As a case study of major depression, it's a fine film, but as an example of either religious grace or existential angst, it just doesn't fly. A Gentle Woman is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 88 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age