Much of
Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce is devoted to spectatorship, emphasizing
the “gentle woman’s” passivity and lack of agency: the film includes an extended
scene from Michel Deville’s Benjamin (when she and her husband go to the
movies), another from Hamlet (a trip to the theatre), exhibits at a natural
history museum and art gallery, shows watched on TV, even animals at the zoo. Further,
the film begins by establishing her death, her body laid out on a bed as her
husband narrates the story of their relationship, a story in which he all but harassed
her into marrying him, and in which one senses that even his acts of generosity
and openness are oppressive to her (for example, he praises an incident he
observed in which another man tried to pick her up and she seemingly turned the
man down, but it’s already been established that her actions were ambiguous,
and the husband’s words serve to make him rather than her the owner of the
narrative). The (pointedly unnamed) woman is far from a blank slate - she’s
sufficiently educated to recall a passage that’s been omitted from the production
of Hamlet, and on their wedding night she appears to be the sexual instigator –
but when married to a less intuitive man, this may impede rather than
facilitate happiness; as played by Dominique Sanda, the film has a recurring sense
of sadly thwarted inquiry and possibility, and when she says near the end that
she’ll be a faithful wife, it rings with defeat more than commitment. The film
anticipates Bresson’s later L’argent in the recurring focus on money
changing hands: after getting married she goes to work in her husband’s
pawnshop business, one of her main attempts at rebellion embodied in paying
needy people more than the items are worth (another action later appropriated by
the husband when trying to prove himself to her).
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