As Damas do Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945)

“É o ‘interior’ que comanda. Sei que isso pode parecer paradoxal numa arte que é toda ‘exterior’. Mas vi filmes em que todo mundo corre e que são lentos. Outros em que os personagens não se agitam e que são rápidos. Constatei que o ritmo das imagens não tem o poder de corrigir toda lentidão interior. Só os nós que atam e desatam no interior dos personagens conferem ao filme seu movimento, seu verdadeiro movimento. É esse movimento que eu me esforço a tornar aparente por alguma coisa ou alguma combinação de coisas – que não seja só um diálogo”.

Robert Bresson

Eu vi As Damas do Boi de Boulogne sob a forte influência de Um Corpo que Cai (1958), de Alfred Hitchcock. Não que eu os tenha visto em sequência a ponto de relacioná-los quase que involuntariamente. A influência se deu pela minha relação com o filme de Hitchcock, que guardo na memória, cujo exemplar revela perfeitamente a ascendência do diretor sobre seus personagens por meio das histórias que ele elegeu para contar. Essa sensação de que existe uma entidade in command, uma figura que manipula, beirando o sadismo, o destino de seus personagens, perpassa toda a extensão de As Damas do Bois de Boulogne. Coincidentemente, ambas as tramas contam com um arranjo, revelado logo nas primeiras cenas, que envolvem personagens dispostos a exercer um domínio sobre o destino dos outros – por razões distintas. Por consequência desses arranjos, as vítimas deles se envolvem emocionalmente de tal modo que se apaixonam loucamente. Dos amantes loucos pode-se esperar qualquer coisa, tanto que Hitchcock encerra seu filme de forma trágica, enquanto Bresson termina o seu de forma redentora – espírito prevalecente na primeira parte de sua carreira.

Novamente, recorro ao excelente livro de Tony Pipolo, Robert Bresson – A Passion for Film, que se esforça para dissuadir estudiosos de Bresson de desvalorizar As Damas, fruto do flerte incipiente do diretor com o melodrama, apesar do fato de Bresson dividir com Diderot (autor do livro, cuja seção Jacques, o fatalista, deu origem ao filme) o mesmo interesse pelo livre arbítrio e o determinismo.

A passagem selecionada é relativamente longa, embora tenha sido editada por mim - no livro, o capítulo relacionado ao filme abrange quase vinte páginas. Preservei a língua original, o inglês, com o intuito de conservar a força do texto. Quem tiver paciência, será agraciado com uma bela análise do filme. Boa leitura!

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Por Tony Pipolo

Watching Les Dames one has the sense that its melodramatic is indeed infused by an otherworldly residue of the mythic and the sacred. But if, on one level, the characters seem to embody good and evil, the denouement asks us to believe that people can change and that the source of that change lies in yet another kind of power beyond the world. Morality is not merely personal in Bresson but is rooted in a premodern spirituality. Indeed Les Dames can be viewed as a contest between the dark forces of a pre-Christian world and death and resurrection through love and faith.

Hélène evokes not only the femme fatale of film noir, before the latter term had any currency, but a number of larger than life incarnations of the vengeful woman, from Medea and Clytemnestra to Racine´s Phaedra and the title character of Keats´s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, who lures braves knights to their deaths. The darkness of the imagery associated with Hélène and the gravity with which Bresson treats her give her a near mythic aura, in no small measure reinforced by the Spanish actress Maria Casarés´s hypnotic demeanor and Mona Lisa smile. Despite the problems Bresson had with her and she with him, she perfectly embodies the requisite qualities, as otherworldly as she would be in Cocteau´s Orpheus films. Though Hélène scheme falls short of the ultimate fatalities brought about by her legendary sisters, in the context of society to which she and Jean belongs she certainly calculates his social death.

The very polarities that the women in Bresson´s first two films occupy (the only two with mature women in principal roles) – namely, those devoted to the religious life and those of questionable morality – suggest the force of original sin in Bresson´s universe. Each film has a secondary female character who must be rescued from her fallen condition. In Les Anges Thérèse kills the man responsible for her imprisonment and is saved by Anne-Marie; in Les Dames Agnès disreputable past, Hélène instrument of revenge, is ultimately redeemed by the power of love. To clinch the matter, of the moment of redemption Thérèse, in nun´s habit, leaves Anne-Marie´s deathbed a new person, just as Agnès, in bridal gown, lying as if on a saint´s tomb, is roused from near death to a new, purified life. In a sense all three are novices who must die to their previous lives. Bresson´s apparent disposition toward spiritual rebirth requires immoral characters in need of reformation, yet it is also true that he often links sin to sexuality and that most later characters, including the male protagonists of the three films of the 1950s and the female adolescents of the three in the 1960s, are either insulated from or corrupted through sexual initiation. To appreciate all of this is to realize that the generic frame of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is largely skeletal and that Bresson had other things in mind.

Just as he would qualify Pickpocket´s affinity with the police or crime thriller by asserting that his main concern was the strange journey of two “souls” toward each other, Les Dames also concerns the union of two individuals after a strange journey. The love that finally binds the unlikely couple, Jean and Agnès, is beyond Hélène comprehension. Like Iago, whose evil schemes are underwritten by his envy of the love between Othello and Desdemona, Hélène cannot bear the thought that such a love can exist and that it can transform character. Where she miscalculates is to assume that Jean´s capacities and values, sprung from the same class predispositions, are identical to her own. The denouement therefore marks the affinity this film has with its predecessors and its successors.

As determined to chasten cinematic form as his narratives are to redeem sinners, Bresson was not content simply to alter the objectives of melodrama in line with his spiritual preconceptions. He engineered the mechanics of conventional cinematic storytelling into the machinery of formal and narrative design, embedding the contest of wills directly within the connective tissue of the film´s construction. Fades, dissolves, and cuts – those familiar, often redundant, tropes of sequential cinematic logic – are here loaded with moral and psychological weight, executing Hélène´s calculated will even as they advance the narrative inexorably toward an end she cannot foresee. Just as Iago´s designs propel nearly every move of Othello´s plot, Hélène´s insidious plan becomes – until it is disrupted – the blueprint of the film´s progression, its storyboard. The detailed analysis of the film´s deployment of transitional devices (e.g., fades and dissolves) is intended to reinforce that idea, demonstrating how Bresson turned such structural conventions into instruments of narrative control. In this way the moral contest of wills that drives the narrative is mirrored directly by the alternating implications of fades and dissolves.