It’s my distinct pleasure to announce Gentle Creatures: Robert Bresson and Mani Kaul, a Dostoevsky double-header comprising adaptations of the short story “A Gentle Creature”––Bresson’s Une femme douce and Kaul’s Nazar––that I’ve programmed and which comes to BAM on Monday, August 5.
This event offers Une femme douce‘s first New York showing since 2017; searches yielding nothing, I’m plainly unsure when Nazar last played locally. Either are exemplary visions of their director’s genius. As a pairing, this program presents some study in contrasts: making his first color film, Une femme douce finds Bresson adding new layers to his oft-imitated, never-surpassed style, while Nazar allows Kaul to turn a narrative more linear than earlier triumphs (Duvidha, Uski Roti) into a formalist playground, tracing characters’ emotions with drifting cameras, spatial disorientation, reflections, and startling soundscapes.
Official description of both films below:
Nazar
Two decades after Robert Bresson made Une femme douce, Mani Kaul approached Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature” with such staggering effect as to suggest nobody better understood its possibilities—to such ends that he engaged his own daughter, Shambhavi Kaul, to embody the story’s theme of corrupted innocence. Nazar implodes basic concepts of film language in nearly every shot, and sound has seldom been applied to narrative cinema with such impact. Though lesser-known than Bresson in western cinephilia, Kaul was as galvanizing, radical, and revolutionary, a distinction borne out by this double-feature.Une femme douce
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s peerless psychological depth is married to Robert Bresson’s often-imitated, never-surpassed style in Une femme douce, a photo negative of the domestic drama that casts courtship, commitment, and mourning as surreal memories. Working in color for the first time, the great French director Robert Bresson moves the setting from 19th century St. Petersburg to modern-day Paris, with Dominique Sanda (Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, The Conformist) in the titular role. Une femme douce remains a rare object—like discovering fresh territory for a director so endlessly excavated—that, seen with Nazar, upends possibilities of cinematic narrative.