Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is, on the surface, the most accessible work from the maker of Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, etc. Taken from an episode in an eighteenth-century novel by Diderot and updated 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 young prostitute. The first step in her plot is to provide the young woman, Agnes, and her mother with shelter and privacy far away from Agnes' 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 - thus removing the external character motivation and plot logic that arose naturally in the original story from the gross mis-match of a “gentleman” and a young woman of ill repute - that Bresson takes his first step in the abstraction necessary to create this drama of love's triumph. From the start, then, things--from Hélène's original conception to Agnes' determined insistence on privacy--seem to be taking place on some level other than the obvious. Bresson further effects what some have called his “distanced” approach--but what is, in fact, a distillation of passions otherwise inexpressible--in Jean Cocteau's dialogue, and in a visual format that concentrates the action within confines having little determinable relationship to the outside. Even the Bois de Boulogne seems to consist of one corner, one waterfall....
Bresson has commented, “As far as I could, I have eliminated anything which might distract from the interior drama. For me, the cinema is an exploration within. Within the mind, the camera can grasp anything.”
This film was for years a thing of legend only; very few people had seen it since its original release, but those who did wrote of its extraordinary impact. On its first postwar revival in the early Sixties in the U.S., it proved a work of genius that more than lived up to its reputation. Today, one finds the name on the best ten lists of many critics, but only rarely does the film itself make an appearance. (JB)