Summary
A wealthy young woman, Anne-Marie Lamaury, decides to follow her vocation and becomes
a nun in a convent which occupies itself with the rehabilitation of female prisoners.
During a prison visit, she meets another young woman, Thérèse, with whom
she starts to take an interest. Thérèse resolutely claims that she is innocent
and rejects Anne-Marie’s attentions. When she is released from prison, Thérèse
kills the man who committed the crime for which she was sentenced. She then seeks
sanctuary in Anne-Marie’s convent but is unable to speak about what she has done. Anne-Marie
is nonetheless determined to bring about Thérèse’s spiritual transformation,
even if she risks alienating herself from her fellow sisters...
Review
Robert Bresson’s first full-length film contains many of the essential ingredients and
themes which would recur time and again in his subsequent works, but it is, at the same
time, startlingly different to his later films. The nature of sin, the susceptibility
of the human spirit to evil, and the path back to redemption are ideas which underpin
much of Bresson’s cinema, and it is interesting to see how the director evolves his approach
to these matters in the course of his long film-making career.
For anyone familiar with Bresson’s later films, the most striking thing about Les Anges
du péché is that it is a conventional film, made using standard film-making
techniques with professional actors. Yet, at the same time, the film bears the unmistakable
stamp of its creator, both in the film’s subject matter (the necessity for redemption
in spiritual fulfilment) and its directness. In comparison with Bresson’s
final film, L’Argent (1980),
there are probably more similarities than differences, even though the visual style of
the two films could scarcely be more different. Les Anges du péché
is perhaps the more complex film, because it deals with the idea of redemption from
two quite different perspectives, that of Thérèse and Anne-Marie Lamaury.
The sinner and the saint are equally deserving of spiritual renewal, and the fact that
both find grace through each other is a typically Bressonesque comment that in human nature
there are no absolutes in good or evil.
© James Travers 2002
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