SUBJECTS

Man-woman relationships -- France -- Drama, Prostitutes -- France -- Drama, Revenge -- Drama

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne

(The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne)

Imported 35mm Print

One of Robert Bresson’s most incandescent works.

Senses of Cinema
featuring

Maria Casarès, Elena Labourdette, Lucienne Bogaert, Paul Bernard,

Bresson’s most accessible work (on the surface) updates an episode in an eighteenth-century novel by Diderot to a contemporary Paris setting. It concerns a beautiful woman, Hélène (Maria Casarès in her first starring role), who takes revenge on her ex-lover by luring him into marriage with a prostitute. The first step in her plot is to provide the young woman, Agnès, and her mother with shelter and privacy far away from Agnès’s dance-hall clientele. Hélène then arranges the meeting, and the rest follows of its own accord. Only the result is something she had not predicted. It is in contemporizing the story, and in Jean Cocteau’s dialogue, that Bresson takes his first steps in the abstraction necessary to create a drama of love’s triumph. What some have called his “distanced” approach is, rather, a distillation of passions otherwise inexpressible.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Robert Bresson
Based On
  • Jacques le fataliste by Denis Diderot, dialogue by Jean Cocteau

Cinematographer
  • Philippe Agostini
Language
  • French
  • English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 90 mins
Source
  • Courtesy Institut Français, thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy
Permission
  • Janus Films/Criterion Collection
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Les dames du Bois de Boulogne documents  

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1999

The poetry of precision: the films of Robert Bresson (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 1998

Robert Bresson (press kit), Pacific Film Archive, 1998

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (program note), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Robert Beers, 1982

Dames du bois de Boulogne, Les (review), Monthly Film Bulletin, Richard Roud, 1966

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (program note), University of Illinois Film Society, T. J. Reiss, 1966

Les dames du Bois du Boulogne (program note), David Stewart Hull, 1964

Les dames du Bois du Boulogne (review), Variety, Robert B. Frederick, 1964

Notes on Robert Bresson (article), Sight and Sound, Gavin Lambert, 1953

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (shot analysis), Jean Sémolué

Displaying 10 of 16 publicly available documents.


View all Les dames du Bois de Boulogne documentation on CineFiles.