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The two-way street between convent and prison, the perfect place for Robert Bresson to seed themes and images. The Dominican nunnery is devoted to female rehabilitation, inmates seek a new life among the sisters, "a harsh legion." In comes the eager, bourgeois novitiate (Renée Faure), convinced of the sublimity of her mission and determined to save the soul of the former convict who "stains anything white" (Jany Holt). The synergy between one (whose faith is inseparable from ego) and the other (who sees "indifference" as the cure for suffering) crystallizes the tensions simmering within placid chambers and corridors, where people compete for attention and accuse each other, hunger for severity and forgiveness, quote Pascal and St. Francis back and forth. Outside is a noir world of mist and prowling silhouettes, in the other words France during the Occupation. Bresson's control of cinematic space (deep-focus panning and tilting, slow dissolves as links to the ineffable) is already absolute, the pull towards the essential sumps up the purchase of a gun and the shooting of a lover with long takes of blank walls and faceless men. And yet, is there a more tactile filmmaker? The hard checkerboard floor on which the characters lay face down with outstretched arms, the loud clanking of the prison food cart pushed down a flight of stairs, above all the expelled heroine after "scraps of peace" in the convent's courtyard, her upturned visage pelted by raindrops. The setting is further distilled in Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped, the closing image resurfaces as Pickpocket manacles, by the time of Lancelot du Lac the habits have become medieval armor. With Sylvie, Mila Parély, Marie-Hélène Dasté, Yolande Laffon, Paula Dehelly, and Silvia Monfort. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |