In his first color film, Bresson uses a subdued but quietly seductive, even dreamy palette, transposing a Dostoevsky short story to modern-day Paris. Dominique Sanda, one of the relatively few Bresson “models” to continue in acting, is a young woman whose suicide causes her tightass pawnbroker husband to reflect on the course of their meeting and marriage, the insoluble mystery of her despair pursued in a series of flashbacks which include an unforgettable Bressonian production of Hamlet.
