A well-off young woman decides to become a nun, joining a convent that rehabilitates female prisoners. Through their program, she meets a woman named Thérèse who refuses any help because she says she was innocent of the crime she was convicted for. After being released from prison, Thérèse murders the actual perpetrator of the crime and comes to seek sanctuary in the convent.
Renée Faure Jany Holt Sylvie Mila Parély Marie-Hélène Dasté Yolande Laffon Paula Dehelly Silvia Monfort Gilberte Terbois Louis Seigner Georges Colin Geneviève Morel Christiane Barry Jean Morel Jacqueline Champi Madeleine Clervanne Andrée Clément Elisabeth Hardy Bernard Lajarrige Jacqueline Marbaux Claire Olivier Madeleine Rousset Henri de Livry
죄악의 천사들, Os Anjos do Pecado, La conversa di Belfort, Los ángeles del pecado, Das Hohelied der Liebe, A bűn angyalai, Ангелы греха, 罪の天使たち, 罪恶天使, Syndens änglar
France
France
It is unquestionably a very interesting film, it is not grandiose, but rather its uncommon excellence is interpreted in the discovery of its unflappable development and its calm presentation., within Bressonian minimalism one experiences the casual sorrows of a purely religious devotion towards a tireless search for redemption.
Everything is positioned to leave the events in thoughts, by providing little context the plot unfolds at the whim of the director, less is more, and this film is the beginning of an extraordinary career.
I haven't yet found a reason to sign on for the anti-psychology/anti-realism of Bresson's later movies, but early Bresson had no equal in devising cinematic structures adequate for dramatizing "unfilmable" states of interiority (with unfathomable-to-me minutiae of Catholic doctrine generally being an organizing principle.)
Invites reading against the grain and leaves me wondering how much of the ambiguous lesbianism between Teresa and Ana Maria was intentional.
Watchlust, 4/2021: #22/67.
Some of what is exciting about it is helped by auteurism as it is recognizable Bressonian while remaining visually expressive in ways that are very different from his later work. I don’t think it quite builds up dramatically like Bresson’s best work as it is a little uneven for that, but the better scenes do have a lot of force.
It’s genuinely bizarre seeing actors emoting in a Robert Bresson film lol. Laughing, crying and melodrama? In my Bresson? In this economy??
No but this was a very interesting film, and despite it being a fairly “conventional” film a lot of the seeds of Bresson’s later trademarks are spread out here - in particular the matter of fact dialogue, spirituality in oppressive environment and an elliptical narrative. Hell, it even ends with an incredible close up shot of a pair of hands. It’s also way less scathing than I was expecting given how nihilistic his later films felt, I mean this film is like Our Little Sister compared to Mouchette or L'Argent. And like his cohort Éric Rohmer, one thing about Bresson that has always stood out to me was the subtle beauty in his visual style that doesn’t completely call attention to itself - and his debut feature has that in spades.
13th Robert Bresson (after Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, Four Nights of a Dreamer, Au Hasard Balthazar, A Gentle Woman, Lancelot du Lac, Les Dames Du Bois de Boulogne, The Trial of Joan of Arc, A Man Escaped, Mouchette and L’Argent)
Collab with ANNA!
Bresson's first feature is cacophony manifest. Maybe it's just because we know him for sparse, hushed cinema about lives struggling for grace, but Angels of Sin is no private wrestle with God. Instead, the walls of the convent are filled with yells of protestation between the nuns, recriminations and grudges abounding as the sisterhood struggles with the presence of two new novices. Both of whom disrupt the harmony of the convent by their self-interest. Anne-Marie is…
Bresson Marathon 1/13
A perfect melodrama with intresting involving storyline. The forgiveness of God is a light in this darkness of this world.
Remarkable film.
67/100.
Bresson's first feature is a crime melodrama dressed in nun's robes. Although it adheres to the codes and conventions of the women's pictures of the early 40s, its content is, even at this early stage, purely Bressonian: faith, transference, grace, guilt. Flawless direction.
Nun content is a well that never seems to run dry for me. The repression of aching desires. The disproportionate want to do good unto others. Those equal parts freaky and anonymous habits. Bresson does fine work mining the nunnery at the heart of his debut for all its worth, turning it into a staging ground for a moral inquiry into goodness and privilege, particularly questioning what relevance such concepts have outside of a given community. Mannered but deft, unadorned but shot through with striking contrasts, this is a great introduction to a future master.
Mini-collab with Ethan Lyon who is far more into this Bresson guy than I am, but in all fairness, most people are
"Do not obey my orders, obey my silences."
Wish Bresson followed this advice with less talking, more silence.
Perhaps purposefully hackneyed nunnery melodrama. It's hard to fault the performances of any of the women or the cinematography, but something was annoying me by the end. The misplaced martyrdom of Sister Anne-Marie and her ambitious and vain pride in reforming convicts... just rang hollow. Plus her mistreatment of cat Blackie unforgiveable. Like Therese said, the guilty forgive, the innocent get revenge. And revenge was eventually doled out, or as I refer to it, fate. Anyway, somehow still managed to be my favorite of the 4 Bresson I watched, probably because it was the least obviously Bressonian of his films, this being his debut feature film...
The power of nunsploitation is in stripping the anonymity of the attire bare to expose the passions of the flesh, which in theory shares many of the same visual and thematic fixations Bresson imparts - hands, faces, sin, repentance - though the question of redemption here is far from one of sensationalist euphoria and more a middling moral contemplation saved by fleeting moments of grace bestowed through early sightings of Bresson's latter formal mastery. Perhaps neither Franco nor D'Amato could never achieve the human weariness of Pickpocket, but Bresson certainly could never conceive something as defiantly transformative as Alucarda; if this is a film of faith then it has reinforced my belief that Mickey Reece's Agnes remains the only great film about nuns* that's not entirely concerned with either lesbians or hysterics.
*Shame on me for forgetting about Rivette's The Nun.
[58]
Like most auteurist’s early pictures, only vaguely reminiscent of what ended up defining their style later on, but in the same breath I’m not surprised to know that this is a Bresson film. It still seizes a large chunk of the themes that would recur throughout his entire body of work: Religion, in the broadest sense, but also the question and application of forgiveness, the exoneration of sins through repentance, and the variability of human nature w.r.t. the presence (or absence) of faith. Granted, he’d tackle similar material more convincingly—and to a significantly broader degree—less than a decade later in DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST, but his control here is nothing if not promising. It’s not the kind of…
Early Bresson is very much worth your time. You can gather from his first two films that he must have decided to master the classical Hollywood style before going on to do his own remarkable and medium-defining thing. And what a foundation he lays for himself here in this subtly moving tale of devotion. Its ending points to Bresson’s future as maybe the most thoughtfully emotive director to ever set foot behind a camera.
