A GENTLE WOMAN BY ROBERT BRESSON

As known, Robert Bresson rejects the widespread theatrical forms of film adaptation of a literary text. The use of author’s expressive means in cinema creates a separate, unique (characteristic almost exclusively for Bresson) space for the interpretation of literary texts. Bresson’s style in cinema makes it possible to change (transform) the narrative structure of the text being filmed subtly but radically and, at the same time, to remain faithful to the spirit of the original text. So, any Bresson adaptation is interesting also as an original reading (in many ways different from literary or theatrical readings). In the article, I trace the author’s methods of transforming and at the same time preserving the spirit of the screened work on the example of the film A Gentle Woman based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s story “A Gentle Creature” or (sometimes translated as) “The Meek One”. In the first part of the article, I offer an immanent analysis of the story and try to show the meta-plot nature of the main intrigue (at the plot level, the decisive events are immediately known and do not constitute any intrigue). The main character and at the same time the narrator leads a monologue (the story is exhausted by the narrator’s monologue) to clarify the truth of the event (his wife’s suicide) and determine his own degree of guilt. Along with other underground types and characters, the main character gets confused in his own mind and hesitates between self-exposure (admission of guilt to the Meek) and self-justification. Against the background of the monologue of the protagonist (the diegetic narrator), the silence of the Meek, together with the uncertainty of the motives of her behavior and a very general description of her character, becomes an important key element in the structure of the narrative. I prove the inconsistency of interpretive attempts to break the silence of the Meek to explain her character or her suicide. In the second part of the article, I pay special attention to the context of Dostoevsky’s remarks about various types of suicide from A Writer’s Diary and show the impossibility of explaining the Meek’s suicide by any logical or explanatory schemes (which always work in the case of other Dostoevsky’s suicidal characters). For Dostoevsky, the Meek’s suicide differs from the other described suicides and remains incredible and inexplicable. In the concluding part of the article, I consistently trace the transformation of the text in the film. The erasure of the traits of the hero’s underground consciousness and the diminution of the role of diegetic narration (without which it is impossible to imagine the meta-plot basis of the story) in the film leave intact the understatement of the Meek’s character and the vagueness of the motives of her suicide. With the radical transformation of the story, Bresson retains the silence of the Meek as the main structural defining element. At the same time, the understatement of the character and the vagueness of the Meek’s motives in the film point to an insurmountable gap between possible explanatory schemes and an anguish pushing towards a suicide and a feeling of impossibility to live. Bresson also reproduces the ambiguity and uncertainty of the protagonist against the background of despair and belated admission of his own guilt.

Dostoevsky, Bresson, underground consciousness (man), suicide, diegetic narrator