Film school students should be required to watch this. It's an encyclopedia of concise, efficient storytelling methods. A distraught man rolls over on his bed - and those five seconds tell you everything you need to know - other filmmakers would take a five-minute scene to get the same message across. After watching this film, most Hollywood-made films seem excessively loaded down with words. The mantra in film schools is always "show, don't tell," but they rarely practice what they preach. Usually they end up having a character say out loud a main plot point. Robert Bresson is the master of "show, don't tell," and any aspiring filmmaker should be required to watch this and some of his other films.
My complaint about this film is that the story is contrived and unrealistic. It focuses almost entirely on cruelty, crime and suffering, at the expense of anything else. This film depicts human life as constant misery, even for the "successful people." It ignores the other side of life - that good things can and do happen, sometimes at the least expected time. Film critics like to claim that Bresson never manipulates the viewer's emotions, but that's baloney. As you sit there and watch one awful thing after another happen on the screen, how can you feel anything other than bummed out and depressed?
The end result is a warped view of human life on Earth, which is presented to the viewer without editorializing, and the viewer is supposed to draw his/her own conclusions. But the evidence presented is so heavily biased towards misery that the conclusion is embedded within the evidence. Discount the story and watch this film only for its style and technique.
My complaint about this film is that the story is contrived and unrealistic. It focuses almost entirely on cruelty, crime and suffering, at the expense of anything else. This film depicts human life as constant misery, even for the "successful people." It ignores the other side of life - that good things can and do happen, sometimes at the least expected time. Film critics like to claim that Bresson never manipulates the viewer's emotions, but that's baloney. As you sit there and watch one awful thing after another happen on the screen, how can you feel anything other than bummed out and depressed?
The end result is a warped view of human life on Earth, which is presented to the viewer without editorializing, and the viewer is supposed to draw his/her own conclusions. But the evidence presented is so heavily biased towards misery that the conclusion is embedded within the evidence. Discount the story and watch this film only for its style and technique.