Robert Bresson is a filmmaker of tremendous artistic and historical importance, an artist of inspiration and prominence to other filmmakers and writers, and a creator of works of the utmost humanity. Unfortunately, he is drastically misrepresented on the consumer market, his films lacking availability on the video and dvd formats. Bresson’s second film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne has been recently released on dvd in the Criterion Collection, an occasion that allows us to hope for others to follow and to look anew at this oft neglected early work. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a film that many have struggled to place. Taken from a section in Diderot’s Jacques la fataliste and co-scripted by Jean Cocteau it has been for some a film apart, a precursor of the much appraised films to come, for others it is one with the rest of Bresson’s works.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne concerns Hélène, a jealous women plotting to exact revenge on her ex-lover Jean, for her slight at his hands. Her stratagem employs Agnès, a cabaret dancer and prostitute, and her mother, former neighbors in the country who have fallen upon hard times and, subsequently, from social graces. Through the guise of generosity, Hélène offers them a return to repute, though it is merely a tool for her requital against Jean ,whom she lures into a marriage with Agnès even as he remains ignorant of her past. Hélène may be seen to correspond to what Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse labels the Informer: “the Informer discovers a secret for me. This secret…comes from the outside: it is the other’s ‘outside’ which was hidden from me.” Hélène withholds Agnès’s past from Jean so as to dismantle his image of her. She disrupts his concept of Agnès; she places his affections upon a fabrication and allows, in the words of Barthes, “an ungrateful fragment of reality to land on (him)”

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a film in which the present is trodden upon by the weight of the past and restrained by the pressing of the future. Hélène’s scheming dominates the actions of the characters; her history with Jean and his emerging union with Agnès engender the manner and movements of the characters. Les Dames… is a film set on a path, a film of the determinedness of the future because of the past and the subsequent constricting in the present made clear by the use and relationship of image and sound. The action and spaces of the image track are determined by the singular aims of Hélène, her desire for revenge and her understanding of what this entails, the soundtrack inscribing the insistence of the inescapable present.

Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse of the ability to control: “to make someone wait: the prerogative of all power.” Hélène’s cunning lies in recognition of this. Jean must wait to learn of his bride’s past and it is Hélène who holds this power and control over temporality that defines the action of Les Dames… She withholds the past to ensure the future; forced to wait Jean is at the whim of an inevitable return. It is this which Bresson depicts so exceptionally through his camera movements and framings.

One may say that Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a film in which there is an absence of the present. This depiction stems from the beautiful and intricately composed camera movements and mise-en-scène, which continually convey the degree to which Jean, Agnès, and her mother are acting out events long conceived of and inscribed with the past. Bresson’s predilection for showing minor moments that impart all the more essentially the truths of the characters is already in place here, brilliantly conveyed through framings and close-ups that detail the forces which persuade an expression or movement. However, in a few instances one gets the feeling that the style doesn’t match this entirely, or perhaps imparts it too heavily, that the display is slightly too grand, the movements a tad too ornate. One might even say the film is in parts too stylish. This may be a biased view seen through the lens of Bresson’s other films, films in which one frequently feels a lack of style, a cinema simply of truths.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is by no means garish and is truly sensitive and insightful, and while the past and future dominate the images, it is through the sound construction that Bresson defines the (helpless) present in which Hélène’s subjects roam unaccountable. It is the use of sound in Les Dames… that most strongly connects it to later Bresson. While the images bear the burdens of the past and the fates of the futures. the present presses upon the characters and spaces through the (often offscreen) sounds that envelop the events that are themselves so confined. The tapping of dancing shoes, cars passing by, the downpour of rain.

Jean and Agnès’s surroundings are weighed down and pressing of the sounds enclosing the two lovers limit their maneuverability both physically and psychically. Agnès’s attempts to rid herself of Hélène’s designs fall upon deaf ears. Hers and Jean’s fates are sealed. They lay dormant in an audile present that encircles them and restricts them to their determined futures. This may be the lesson of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne: despite the movement towards salvation in the final moments, Agnès and Jean are left without choices and, more importantly, without the weight and importance of simply making a choice. They are left to drift toward a future they cannot control, their fates written in the past and the revenging schemes of Hélène. They remain without control of their gestures till the final moments in which they reach the future designed for them. Only then can Jean assert himself and truly decide his own course. Avital Ronell writes that “no decision is strictly possible without the experience of the undecidable.” While the futures of Jean and Agnès remain bleak they have in the end experienced the undecidable at the hands of Hélène and come through to gain that essential human characteristic of choice.
—ANDREW ADLER