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Powers discusses "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne," the first great film of Robert Bresson. This film is the closest Bresson ever came to a Hollywood movie.

There's something daunting about greatness - it smacks of the museum, if not the mausoleum. That's why I'm partial to major directors' breakthrough works, the films they made after serving their apprenticeship but before they became congealed in their reputations or a fetishism of form. For the life of me I can't see how anyone could think L'Avventura an advance on Le Amiche, Stalker more revelatory than Ivans Childhood, Ulysses' Gaze more trenchant than Reconstruction, The Puppetmaster richer than A Time to Live and a Time to Die, or GoodFellas half so alive as Mean Streets. In all these cases, the early triumphs have a freedom, directness, and exhilarating freshness that the later, "greater" works never quite recapture.

The same is true of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, which catches Robert Bresson, then in his mid-30s, at precisely the moment that his talent was blossoming into genius. Sleek as a panther, this is Bresson's first great film, and has the inexorable pull of a fairy tale.

Hypnotic Marie Casares plays Helene, a Parisian sophisticate who discovers that her lover. Jean (Paul Bernard), has jilted her. In revenge, she sets up a young dancer/prostitute, Agnes (Elina Labourdette), and her mother (Lucienne Bogaert) in a sunny apartment and instructs them to wear the mask of pious propriety. Having set her snare, she proceeds to dangle Agnes before Jean, who promptly falls in love with this apparent moral paragon; then on their wedding day, Helene triumphantly informs him that he's just married a whore. Yet Helene's victory proves illusory, for in the legendary closing scene, Bresson gives one of cinema's most exquisite demonstrations of the transcendent power of love. Agnes begs Jean's forgiveness for not telling him the truth - she, too, is guilty - and her pure-hearted sincerity melts him. The whole film is a movement toward whiteness: The sinister black velvet of Helene's dresses gives way to the ethereal radiance of Agnes' wedding gown; which fills the screen like the plumage of a fallen angel.

This polished gem of a story is plucked whole from the center of Diderot's Jacques la Fataliste, a giddily subversive novel that Bresson commentators tend to give short shrift. In fact. the book is one of the marvels of the 18th century, a work of such playful intelligence that in many ways it feels more up-to-date than anything Bresson ever made. Even as the servant Jacques and his Master listen to an innkeeper s wife spin this yarn about the jilted lady and her cunning scheme for revenge, her tale's being constantly interrupted by toasts, questions about room keys, the kibitzing of her audience. At the end, the Master even faults the storyteller for making the young prostitute too cold and immoral - a failing that Bresson softens in his own Agnes. All these interruptions and layers of commentary are part of the point. They serve Diderot's sense of the manvsidedness of truth. his delight in the game that is fiction.

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If Diderot is a precursor of today's postmodern trapdoor artists, Bresson belongs to that rigorous strand of modernism that gave us Val-rv's search for "pure" poetry, Beckett's pared-down theatrical endgames, Cage's Zentinged celebrations of silence, and Wittgenstein's elusive aphorisms on the limits of philosophy (which find an even more elusive echo in Bresson's gnomic utterances on the limits of cinema). By nature a radical, Bresson says he gave up painting because Cezanne had already gone to "the brink of what could not be done." You would never catch him in the act of being playful.

Jacques the Fatalist asks whether "everything that happens to us on this earth, both good and bad, is written up above." This is Bresson territory, and he endows Les Dames with a gravity closer to Pascal than to an Enlightenment philosophe. Deadly serious about questions of love and hate, chance and destiny, he makes us feel the allure of Helene's malevolence (after all, evil is seductive) and imbues Agnes with a profound horror at selling herself for money (whether to men or to Helene). Building to a finale that could well become a mere twist, he offers an astonishingly poetic vision of love's saving grace and shrouds this "happy ending" in deliberate ambiguity about whether Agnes will survive her swooning collapse. (In Bresson's world, the answer is inessential.)

This is the closest he ever came to a Hollywood movie, and it features the kind of stylistic ornamentation he would later disavow: Jean-Jacques Grenewald's intrusive score, some dandy camera moves (albeit small ones), and Philippe Agostini's gorgeous photography, which boasts the crisp black and white of a crime picture someone even says, "Follow that car." Metaphorically, even metaphysically costumed (her furs speak volumes), H6lene prowls through the film in a black cowl like the evil witch in Snow White. (Not a completely frivolous comparison: at the end, Jean leans over Agnes like the prince saving Snow White with a kiss). Although Bresson often adapted great writers, this is in many ways his most nakedly literary film. Jean Cocteau's dazzling dialogue is a peculiar blend of the colloquial and the courtly; its preciousness is just right for a film that turns on the difference between surface trappings and inner depths.

So, too, is the acting. After this film, Bresson stopped using professionals, yet apart from Bernard's uneven work as Jean - he's strong at shiftiness, limp at ardor - there's no reason to think that he couldn't handle actors. They may well have felt otherwise: Casares, for one, complained about his insensitive directing methods. Still, the actresses' performances are superb. Bogaert brings a quiet density to Agnes' mother, a woman whose pragmatism borders on pandering, while Labourdette's Agnes radiates the spiritual goodness that will later win Jean's forgiveness. As for the disaffected Casares, she never surpassed her work here, not even playing Death for Cocteau. Whether she's feigning affection for her protages ("We're all angels." she purrs) or coldly raising her hand to Jean's lips while staring blankly ahead, Helene has such archetypal force that it seems incredible Casares was only 22 years old when she made the film. Her dark, baleful eyes burn with the wronged righteousness of millennia.

A note in passing: As with Brecht's theories, Bresson's admirers treat his cinematic dogma as if it were gospel. But just as one can wonder whether the Brechtian alienation devices ever once achieved the affects its creator hypothesized, so one can reasonably ask if all the Bressonian minimalism is necessary. Did his work truly become more profound once he started using nonactors and telling them not to act? Mouchette would obviously be inferior if it were filled with actorish histrionics, but would sublime acting by professionals really diminish it, either cinematically or spiritually? Did Falconetti vulgarize The Passion of Joan of Arc, Chishu Ryu An Autumn Afternoon?

Despite its relative flamboyance, Les Dames is inescapably Bressonian, from its trademark motifs - the emphasis on doors and windows, Agnes's description of her flat as a prison - to the incomparably pregnant use of sound. Ringing phones mark spiritual intrusions, the whishhh of falling rain harks back to the waterfall where Jean first meets Agnes (and forward to her tears), and there's a chilling lewdness to the noise when the young prostitute's chortling clients chase her inside a room and pound on the door. The last situation happens off screen and evokes her entrapment and violation more clearly than anything we actually see.

As with all Bresson's work, you can only marvel at his elegance and vigor, his lack of wasted motion. Consider the scene when Helene finally reveals the truth about Agnes to the stunned Jean. Bresson captures his inner turmoil in a single, unforgettable shot. The distraught bridegroom sits at the wheel of his car desperately hoping to free himself from Helene, who hovers outside like a conquering raven. He reverses to escape - first once, then twice - but the car's so hemmed in that he can only pull forward to the precise point where her face is staring through his window, dark, triumphant, implacable.

Although Bresson has said that he was merely looking for "a kind of coherence" in Les Dames, the whole film has a diamond cutter's precise sense of form. It begins outside a theater, where the selfish Helene, fighting tears, hears an old male friend reveal the hard truth that Jean no longer loves her. Her anger goads her to stage an elaborately vengeful theater piece of her own, a real-life play that doesn't end until Jean's marriage. But the final act gets away from her. Terribly visible in her seeming victory, her defeat finds her banished from the screen (unlike a Nineties director, Bresson would never show Helene's teeth-gnashing comeuppance). The film ends with a scene that echoes and surpasses the opening - a moment of truth between a man a woman, in which Jean and the teary Agnes achieve the redemptive majesty of selflessness and love.

For those of us blessed with knowledge of Bresson's subsequent career when he became, simultaneously, the most materialist and most spiritual of directors - it's easy to see how Les Dames' polished surface is designed to gesture at an interior truth. But when first released, the movie was a puzzler, a flop. Audiences didn't understand Bresson's particular brand of abstractness, so radically different from conventional symbolism. They couldn't grasp why a film anchored in a solid, if dreamy, sense of modern detail (cars, telephones, Agnes' Dietrich-style dancing garb) would tell a story whose mores and motivations so clearly belonged to an earlier century. They were baffled by a stylization that deliberately deters emotional identification and encourages us, however obliquely, to see everything even the human face - as the mere husk of an unspoken inner essence. (Lest we think the world has grown more attuned to such figurative filmmaking, it's worth noting that countless critics were hung up on the lack of conventional drama in The Thin Red Line, despite a level of metaphysical huffing and puffing that would make Bresson shudder.)

It's always tempting to shape a great artist's career into a satisfying narrative (Picasso turned himself into a name brand, Welles was Hollywood's victim). And so it has been with Bresson. Purists insist that his work became greater as it grew more austere, bemoaning Dominique Sanda and his embrace of color; others claim the contrary, finding his postPickpocket work the cinematic equivalent of flagellation. Yet such neat arguments confuse manner with achievement. Between 1945 and 1983, Bresson made masterpieces (and some clinkers) in different styles, from Les Dames' controlled dreaminess to the ferociously rigorous impressionism of LArgent with its color-coded valium; in between came other masterworks, including A Man Escaped, Au hasard Balthasar, and Mouchette. Lucid as algebra, all these films are charged with what Graham Greene once called "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."

Henry James famously remarked that there's no substitute for simply liking a book. The same is true, of course, with film. While Les Dames is my favorite work by Bresson, I wouldn't dream of calling it the greatest. I simply find his vision more recognizably human here than in many of the more acclaimed films, partly because it's less bleak than watching people see escape in suicide, partly because it's less steeped in some ghastly idea of Christianity (though you can sense it lurking in the name of Agnes, the patron saint of young virgins), but mainly because it doesn't yet have the forbidding refinement of his later masterworks, which often treat ordinary cinematic pleasure as a kind of sin against life. You'll find no such grimness in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, the most sheerly enjoyable film of his incomparable career. Although Bresson had already begun emptying the pond to catch the fish, there's still a lovely shiver of light across the water. (

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