Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945, Robert Bresson) (Patreon)

88/100

Second viewing, last seen 1999. Decent chance I'm the only person on Earth who considers this to be far and away Bresson's greatest film (see also Too Late Blues for Cassavetes), and clear evidence that he'd have been a legendary filmmaker even if he hadn't gone transcendental. For someone who subsequently spurned professional actors, the man certainly knew how to take full advantage of María Casares' star quality, repeatedly holding on her elegant shiv of a gaze; when Jean leaves Hélène's apartment after their breakup (a pitch-perfect scene, making her veiled intentions clear to us yet plausibly opaque to him), Bresson has the light from the open door briefly flood Casares' face, so that its closing behind Jean leaves Hélène in sorrowful shadow—a stirringly expressionistic flourish that no indication-allergic "model" could possibly make work. This approach culminates in one of my dozen or so favorite shots in cinema: Jean repeatedly attempting to execute a three-point turn in a tight space, his car window re-framing Hélène each time he inches forward, whereupon she sticks the verbal knife in yet again. While I'd never want to take Pickpocket and A Man Escaped away from those who revere them (as opposed to oh let's just hypothetically say considering them quite good, possibly there's some heathen out there who feels that way, let us now pray for his eternal soul), I do mourn the loss of the director who made this not even remotely minimalist near-masterpiece. There's an alternate universe in which Bresson worked with Deneuve and Moreau and Delon and possibly even Huppert toward the end, and if somebody there could find a way to ship all of those films to me, I'd greatly appreciate it. 

In virtually anyone's hands, though, this would still be the stealthily romantic riposte to Les Liaisons dangereuses that I didn't even know I wanted. (Dangerous Liaisons was originally my #1 for 1988, though I find Hampton's embellishments a bit too cute now.) Not having read Jacques the Fatalist, I don't know whether this characterization of Agnès comes straight from Diderot or was modified by Bresson and/or Cocteau; either way, her surprising autonomy distinguishes her from Madame de Tourvel and ensures that Les Dames, for all its Machiavellian manipulation, never feels overly deterministic. Agnès recognizes from the jump that Hélène is playing her, even if she's not sure to what end ("I prefer not to understand. It'd be worse if I did"), and spends the entire movie engaged in a futile battle to remove herself from the chessboard. That's the emotional core. As with The Lady Eve, which features more or less the same revenge strategy (except the woman fakes her own disreputability via disguise instead of utilizing another woman's genuine article), I'm irked by everything hinging on a moralistic view of female sexuality that's stipulated as correct. It helps a little that prostitution never gets directly mentioned, with cabaret dancing employed as its signifier; it helps a lot that Les Dames ends almost as magnificently as Eve, abruptly shifting focus from Hélène (never seen again following her ostensible triumph) to her two victims, who jointly decide to transform an ugly, vicious act into something that's almost literally Ordet-style miraculous. Just wildly undervalued, Criterion's stamp of approval notwithstanding; it'd be considered among the greatest works of virtually any "conventional" filmmaker. Being uncharacteristic in hindsight doesn't make a work any less glorious.