Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) - film review

Having tricked her lover Jean into admitting that he no longer loves her, society lady Helène is inwardly consumed by anger and plots a cruel vengeance.  She contrives for Jean to meet and fall in love with an impoverished cabaret dancer, Agnès, a woman who, unbeknown to Jean, has a reputation as a prostitute.  Weary of the male sex, Agnès lives in seclusion with her mother near the Bois du Bologne in Paris, in an apartment provided by Helène.  It is in the park that Agnès and Jean meet, and for Jean it is love at first sight.  Although she initially spurns Jean’s advances, Agnès gradually warms to him and the couple decide to marry.  After the wedding, Helène claims a terrible victory by revealing Agnès’ unsavoury past to Jean...

In later years, director Robert Bresson was very dismissive of his first two films, Les Anges du péché and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, although both were crucial stepping stones in the development of his technique and laid the foundations on which he was able to create his subsequent auteur masterpieces.   In terms of both its subject and its cinematographic style, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is the most conventional of all Bresson’s films, a straightforward revenge melodrama lifted wholesale from Didier Diderot’s great 18th century novel Jacques le fataliste.  The dialogue was supplied by Jean Cocteau, immediately before directing his first feature (and arguably his finest), La Belle et la bête (1946).  

Bresson’s personal misgivings notwithstanding, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a pretty flawless production if one considers only its technical merits.  The film’s failings, such as they are, are confined almost entirely to the contrived plot and wafer-thin characterisation.  Bresson’s dissatisfaction with the film was almost entirely down to his lack of input on the writing side; if he had had the level of control that he would have on his later films, the characters would doubtless have been better developed and the film would have been a far more complex and interesting study in the nature of revenge.  As it was, the film was critically well-received on its initial release and would have a considerable influence on some of the future directors of the French New Wave, in particular François Truffaut.  

Bresson may not have succeeded on the writing front but he shows great ingenuity in his mise-en-scène, creating a stifling sense of oppression and entrapment which serves the narrative admirably.  The impression is that Helène, the main protagonist, sits at the centre of a web like a hungry spider, a web into which her victims haplessly tumble and from which they cannot escape.  This becomes particularly evident in the film’s final sequences, where Helène exerts an almost supernatural hold over her former lover Jean, effortlessly drawing him towards the abyss as she savours her moment of triumph.  The harsh monochrome lighting, redolent of classic film noir with its threatening use of shadows, accentuates Helène’s apparent power whilst reminding us that she now belongs to the darkness, poisoned and transformed into a thing of pure evil by the love that once burned in her heart.  Cinematographer Philippe Agostini was a master at bringing an aura of oppression and doom to the films he worked on and would achieve similar results on many notable French films, including Marcel Carné’s Les Portes de la nuit (1946) and Jules Dassin’s landmark of French film noir, Du rififi chez les hommes (1955).

Perfectly cast in the leading role, that of the vindictive Hélène, is the magnificent Maria Casares.  An acclaimed stage actress, Casares had just triumphed in her first screen role in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945).  With her magnetic personality and penchant for playing cool villainy, Casares exudes venom from just about every pore and creates one of French cinema’s great female monsters in the calculating Hélène.  Yet just as Hélène has inestimable powers of seduction over both sexes, so Casares wins her audience over to her side with consummate ease.  We may disapprove of her character’s conduct, yet her motivation, the desire to repay an unkind blow, is one we can easily engage with, and inwardly we cheer her on as she spins her web of deceit and lures her faithless victim to his worthy downfall.  Of course she is bound to fail, for, as we all know, love will always triumph over evil in the end.  It is not the victory of sweet revenge that Hélène wins for herself, but a passport to endless night - such is the fate of all those who cannot forgive and close their hearts to mercy.  How fitting that Casares’ next great role should be that of Death herself, in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1949).

© James Travers 2011

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