Worldly Parisian Helene (Maria Casares) realizes that her boyfriend Jean (Paul Bernard) has fallen out of love with her. She then sets out to secretly arrange for a relationship to form between Jean and self-loathing dancer and prostitute Agnes (Elina Labourdette). Also featuring Lucienne Bogaert, Jean Marchat, and Yvette Etievant.
Robert Bresson and melodrama are two things I wouldn't expect to see together, seeing as how the director strove in his later work to remove as much sentiment and emotion as possible from his narratives. I couldn't get into this dark soap opera much, for a few reasons. The central character of Jean is never presented in such a way as to explain why anyone, either the two ladies or the audience, should care about him at all. With Jean being such an uninspired sop, most of the rest of the story seems much ado about nothing.
Casares is good in moments as the plotting Helene, but her ever-present "cat ate the canary" smirk grows tiresome and almost comical. Why would anyone trust this woman when she constantly looks like she just poisoned you? Finally, Elena Labourdette gets the biggest emotional workout in the piece, and she seems the most natural. Still, as with Jean, the script is often vague about why these characters behave as they do. Overall, I was disappointed in this, as I like many of Bresson's later works, but this just failed to click.
