"I want the essence of my films to be not the words my people say or even the gestures they perform, but what these words and gestures provoke in them. What I tell them to do or say must bring to light something they had not realized they contained. The camera catches it; neither they nor I really knew it before it happens. The unknown is what I wish to capture."
There is a scene in Bruce Beresford/Horton Foote's Tender Mercies in which Robert Duvall (Mac Sledge) and Tess Harper (Rosa Lee) are alone in a field and he declares his love for her: "I guess it's no secret how I feel about you," he says. "A blind man could see that. Would you think about marrying me?" The moment comes as something of a surprise, since we're given nothing of a "build up" to it. It's treated like just another moment in the lives of these people of so few words - so few words that they turn to country songs for them.
The point is that, while they evidently feel strongly and deeply, the characters in Tender Mercies aren't given to, or equipped for, strong demonstrations of feeling. Once we have made the adjustment that forces us, if we are to care about them, to infer what isn't shown or enunciated by these people, Tender Mercies becomes a very moving and masterfully directed film.
The films of Robert Bresson make the very same demands of an audience when he is AT HIS BEST, in Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Mouchette, and Une Femme Douce. But I had to remind myself of it when, on the "Second Night" in Four Nights of a Dreamer, sitting on a street curb, Jacques says to Marthe, "How many times I was in love!" Marthe replies, "How is that? With whom?" Bresson shows us Jacques walking the streets aimlessly, until he sees a pretty girl and follows her, peering through a shop window, waiting, following her again when she leaves the shop, then passing another girl, and, looking back at the first girl, he follows the second. "With no one, an ideal, the woman in my dream." Marthe: "That's stupid." Jacques: "Yes. And God sends me an angel to show me. To reconcile me to myself." Despite my familiarity with the Dostoevsky story and the 1957 Visconti adaptation of it, Jacques's words arrive out of nowhere.
An art school friend (who resembles Heath Ledger) shows up at Jacques' flat and launches into an unprovoked harangue:
"What's crucial is not the object, not the painter, but the gesture which lifts the presence from the object, and is suspended in a space which delimits it, and, in fact, supports it. Not the object there, not the painter there, but the object and the painter which are not there."
Bresson was a painter, and these remarks are consistent with others he has made about film (see above). Perhaps he is instructing the viewer how to properly interpret his film? The scene merely reminded me of Bresson's fascinating interviews whenever one of his films was released, making somewhat gnomic statements that only seemed to deepen the audience's mystification. Sometimes Bresson made it seem that his defense of his style was more interesting than the style itself.
"White Nights," is a story by Dostoevsky published in 1848, the year before his arrest and exile to Siberia. In Constance Garnett's translation, its subtitle is "a sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer". Written in the first person, it's about a lonely young man's encounter with a forlorn young woman who has a sad story to tell. "From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me." Visconti adapted the story to film in 1957, but the film's artificiality (its snowy cityscape was filmed entirely in Cinecittá), plus an insufferable performance by Maria Schell, made it hard to take in. (Jean Marais looked like he was in physical pain during some of the love scenes with Schell.)
As in Une Femme Douce, in which Dominique Sanda plays certain carefully chosen records to avail us of her emotional state, in Four Nights of a Dreamer, Marthe turns on her radio to a Brazilian sambalero as she disrobes and examines her lovely body in the mirror. And later, by the Seine, Jacques and Marthe listen to a similar samba played by a combo on a tourist bateau ivre as it winds slowly through Paris. Bresson cuts to the combo on the boat performing the song. Of course, the length of the scene suggests that the boat must be moving incredibly slowly for Jacques and Marthe to hear the whole song, but it's an otherwise transcendent moment in the film, the sensual music contributing a further dimension to Jacques and Marthe's desire and longing.
But the film adds up to so little. Bresson's previous two films, Mouchette and Une Femme Douce, so utterly different in tone and texture, are resolved by suicides. When we meet Marthe, she is preparing to throw herself from the Pont Neuf into the Seine. It is the only indication, really, of the depth of her feelings of desertion. Her cheeks are covered in tears as Jacques walks her home. I found it especially puzzling that Marthe's mother, a minor character (but so what?) is barely sketched in by Bresson, despite the fact that she had to be embodied by a flesh and blood person (Lidia Biondi), reduced by Bresson to a kind of depersonalized dummy. When Marthe discovers that the boarder is leaving without her mother telling her, she impulsively packs a bag, enters his room and demands that he take her with him (to Yale, he tells her, on a fellowship). He closes the door, locks it, and commences to undress her. Meanwhile, Marthe's mother calls out to her and Bresson, having to show us that her mother is looking for her in the tiny apartment, puts in a few shots of the mother walking back and forth through a doorway, calling out "Marthe?" Finally naked (just as she was moments before in the film in front of her mirror), Marthe is embraced by him. The shots of Marthe's mother were unnecessary. We could hear her footsteps and her calling out to Marthe. But one could argue that the film is made up of such perfunctory shots. At the opening of the film, Jacques hitchhikes to the country, and Bresson shows us his boyish pleasure at being there by having his actor roll through a meadow and saunter along the road, swinging his arms and humming a tune. These aren't identifiable emotions - Bresson's actors almost never "emote." They are indications of emotions, stripped of their meaning. When Bresson attempted his esthetic approach in Au Hasard, Bathazar with a donkey, he at least could use the excuse that even when a donkey is being highly expressive, how is anyone but a donkey handler going to know? Dostoevsky's narrator says, "I took long walks, succeeding, as I usually did, in quite forgetting where I was, when I suddenly found myself at the city gates. Instantly I felt lighthearted, and I passed the barrier and walked between cultivated fields and meadows, unconscious of fatigue, and feeling only all over as though a burden were falling off my soul. All the passers-by gave me such friendly looks that they seemed almost greeting me, they all seemed so pleased at something. They were all smoking cigars, every one of them. And I felt pleased as I never had before. It was as though I had suddenly found myself in Italy—so strong was the effect of nature upon a half-sick townsman like me, almost stifling between city walls." Dostoevsky goes a great deal further into the narrator's inner life, but the closest Bresson can get to it is Jacques's tape recorder, with which he records the story of his pursuit of an ideal woman, which he plays back to himself as a substitute, I suppose, for an interior monologue. The scenes of Jacques painting, with his canvases on the floor, make it seem like he uses it as therapy. Frustrated, perhaps disappointed at life, at Marthe's rushing into the arms of her former lover the moment he reappears on the Pont Neuf (as promised a year before). But perhaps Bresson would tell me that I'm editorializing?
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