Les Dames du bois de Boulogne

Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945) is a Robert Bresson drama you can watch online on iFILM. Hélène, a wealthy Parisienne dropped by her lover, doesn't rage at him. She smiles, says she understands — and quietly sets a trap.

Her weapon is Agnès, a young cabaret dancer whom poverty has pushed into a life Hélène can expose whenever she chooses. Hélène pays for the girl's flat and gowns, passes her off as respectable, and steers her toward Jean, the man who jilted her. He falls hard and proposes. The revenge is timed for the moment the truth about the bride will wound the deepest. Paul Bernard plays Jean, María Casares the glacial Hélène, Élina Labourdette the cornered Agnès.

This is Bresson's second feature and the last time he worked with trained actors and scripted dialogue — written here by Jean Cocteau, who lifted an episode from Diderot's 18th-century novel Jacques le fataliste and reset it in 1940s Paris. The cruelty hides inside good manners and polite phrasing, which is exactly what makes it sting. For viewers who like their French classics cold, precise and quietly vicious, it catches Bresson right before the radical minimalism that made his name. Stream Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945) online on iFILM.