A Film Canon

The Ladies Of The Bois De Boulogne fuses one of the ancedotes that constitute Diderot's Jacques The Fatalist with the atemporal, aspatial environment within which those anecdotes are told, generalising the novel's omnipresent carriage to a series of restricted, abstracted spaces (lifts, cars, stairwells), all of which feel like so many pretexts for the elaboration of an elusive, transcendent whiteness that alights upon faces and their various surrogates, ensuring that everything outside its purview is reduced to so much shadow; or, rather, that every space, no matter how expansive, is cornered by a shadow that ultimately seems to be the main focus of enquiry, as if to explicate visual cognition as a mere series of receding electromagnetic echoes. From this perspective, Diderot's drama tends to be relocated from the personal to the noumenal, as Bresson subordinates Helene's (Maris Cesares) revenge upon her ex-lover (Paul Bernard), to the apartment within which the tool of that revenge, aristocrat-turned-dancer Agnes (Elina Labourdette), dwells in shamed abstraction from the aristocratic world, her outermost co-ordinates the cold, white fire of Helene's ever-burning hearth, and the gushing waterfalls and fountains of the Bois de Boulogne, as well as the rainstorms for which they are a synecdoche, all of which tend to form the backdrop to crucial moments in this vengeful scheme. That said, Cocteau's script is comparable to Diderot's in terms of the quantity, if not the kind, of its verbosity, while the noumenal element does gesture towards some fatalistic presence. Nevertheless, Bresson's most astonishing contribution, which eludes both Diderot and Cocteau's wordiness, is to dwell on the nuances of Cesares' face until the compassionate dimension of her revenge, or the vengeful dimension of her compassion, becomes clear, producing an almost imperceptible alternation between the two states that borders on a minor revelation.