Director: Robert Bresson, 1969 Screening: National Library of Armenia, Yerevan

What does the contemporary audience feel when watching this silent and cold story? A film where emotions, music, and even movement are largely absent. Everything is minimalist, almost symbolic. The film is often compared to Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Creature. Indeed, there are similarities: a similarly closed-off, unheard, and defenseless woman in a world where dialogue simply does not exist. Yet, while in Dostoevsky the pain is vocal and tragic, in Bresson’s work it is silent and suppressed.

Today, such a character might provoke frustration. We are accustomed to heroines who fight, speak out, and raise their voices. Here, however, there is silence. How should one interpret it? Infinite devotion? Fear? Or a quiet rebellion? Yet this film lingers in memory. Bresson’s silence is a scream turned inward. Perhaps it is precisely within that silence that the heaviest truth about loneliness is revealed.