Relatively minor Bresson, but still an immaculately composed and
carefully patterned film (based on a Dostoyevsky short story) which
recalls the events leading up to the suicide of an unhappy wife. By now
the Christian optimism of the earlier films is increasingly
dissipated, as Bresson focuses on the growing helplessness of a
humanity battered by notions of determinism and the materialist
perspective. Like the subsequent Four Nights of a Dreamer, it is also
inhabited by a new note of reflexivity (a film and play within a film) as
the director calls into question the role of the artist in a universe
without salvation.
