THE LADIES OF THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE C+
(Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne)
France (84 mi) 1945 d: Robert Bresson
A rather insufferable melodramatic chamber drama that struggles with a suffocating, contemptible tone and a monotonous interior theme, where love is used in a cruel and manipulative manner as a blunt instrument of revenge, where characters jump back and forth between friendship, loathsome feelings for one another, and downright distrust, yet they continually end up back in one another’s company, even after vowing to never see one another again. At the center of it all is a French film star, Maria Casarés, born in Spain, forced to flea from the Fascists, taking refuge in Paris where she starred in Marcel Carne’s LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (1945), later playing Death in Jean Cocteau’s ORPHEUS (1950). Here she is an aristocrat, Hélène, a woman of means and social status who uses her wealth like a sledgehammer, continually reminding others of the power she possesses while pretending to offer a helping hand through friendship. The object of her wrath is her ex-lover, Jean (Paul Bernard), a suave, galavanting opportunist who is tricked by Hélène into admitting he’d rather remain friends than lovers, which sends her into a swooning caricature of wicked cruelty, sneering behind the scenes while pretending to be looking out for his best interests. High on her list is finding the right woman who will bring about his downfall, someone who can pass for polite society and cultural refinement with a secret past that can blow up in his face.
Enter Agnès (Elina Labourdette), a young cabaret dancer living with her mother who dreams of performing at the opera, but dances in nightclubs and reportedly sleeps with men for money in order to pay the long overdue rent. Hélène feigns friendship with the mother and agrees to pay their debts and move them to a new apartment near the Bois de Boulogne park, which, unknown to them, is a neighborhood known for prostitutes, so when they do move, it’s more like a prison, as they can never leave without an everpresent reminder of what they’re running away from. Meanwhile, Hélène cleverly introduces Jean who can’t take his eyes off young Agnès, so the trap is set. Loosely based on Denis Diderot’s short story Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître, the film is at times a play, at other times a variation on the French comedy of manners with the literary dialogue written by Jean Cocteau, giving the characters a modern, somewhat novelistic subtext, where each is beset with their own emotional complexities. Despite the dour feeling of hopelessness throughout, the comic element is not forgotten, occasionally veering towards farce, reaching epic proportions of melodramatic hysteria by the end. A much better drama about a woman hellbent on revenge is Jean Moreau in Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1968), a Hitchcock tribute where the husband is murdered on the steps of the church just prior to the marriage ceremony, where she spends the rest of the film tracking down each and every man responsible, becoming a ferociously black comedy by the end.
A more recent film that takes a rags to riches revenge melodrama to hilarious extremes is Ozon’s ANGEL (2007), a deliciously exaggerated, campy tribute to Douglas Sirk, immersed in flamboyant color schemes that attempt to express the inexpressible through overblown melodrama, where he uses artificial means to get at the truth that is hidden underneath the repressed surface of human love and anguish. Bresson’s film doesn’t have the element of delusion and hysteria for a farce, yet all the characters are deluded from reality, each blinded by their own selfish obsessions, where love is an illusion, yet even at the moment when all is revealed, when Jean embarrassingly realizes he’s been tricked, there’s a ridiculous sequence where he gets trapped from making an escape by parked cars, where Hélène, of all people, blocks him in, where he makes 3 or 4 attempts to turn the wheel to free himself, each time returning to the exact same shot of Hélène gloating through the car window at his pathetic state of frustration. The actual finale couldn’t feel more artificially contrived, as no one deserves redemption in this film, as both Hélène and Jean feel like contemptible, overindulged aristocrats who are so used to getting their way, they feel too pampered by the luxury of always having money to help them out of a jam, as if money is the real redemptive modus operandi in this movie. This is an overly solemn and somewhat grotesque caricature of good and evil, easily the least compelling Bresson film, where the angelic goodness of Agnès eventually rises above the cloud of suspicion and human deceit, expressed with all the consumptive subtlety and melodramatic fatalism of Camille, everything he eventually railed against, but it does typify Bresson’s love of setting innocent characters in a downward spiraling morally corrupt world.
