Synopsis
A Gentle Woman (Une femme douce, 1969) — watch online on iFILM. Robert Bresson adapted Dostoyevsky's short story to 1960s Paris: a young wife jumps from a window without a word, and her pawnbroker husband spends the night reconstructing their life together, searching for the moment it broke.
Dominique Sanda, eighteen and unknown, made her screen debut in the role. She plays the wife in flashback with an unusual flatness — not vacancy, but a deliberate opacity the film refuses to decode. Bresson's first colour film, yet the palette is deliberately muted, almost ashen.
Two years later Bresson would return to Dostoyevsky with Four Nights of a Dreamer, but A Gentle Woman remains the harder of the two: 85 minutes, no comfort given. Stream A Gentle Woman (1969) on iFILM.
Starring
Recommendations
Comments 0