It is Bresson's most accessible, classically structured film. Taken from Diderot, it is a story of love, betrayal and revenge. Why a masterpiece? Because it is one of the few films which manage to give the viewer a true sense of what love is and/or should be, of what it may achieve, avoiding the corny lexicon of romance, turning the potentially stale conventions of melodrama into an altogether plausible concoction of events, gestures, actions directly speaking to our experience. In its perfectly self-contained way it keeps showing us again and again that people may actually love each other, in spite of all.
Review of The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne
