Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is having a good day for a change. He is a struggling artist who feels the need to get out of the city and hitchhikes into the countryside, spends some pleasant time there by himself, then when dusk begins to fall he hitchhikes back to Paris. However, as he is walking home over the Pont-Neuf bridge, he notices a woman, Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), standing there contemplating the river below, ready to jump and kill herself. A few others stop to try to dissuade her, but it is Jacques who attracts her attention and gets her to step away...
And that's the first night of the dreamer in this, one of the adaptations of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky story that attracted Luchino Visconti among others, which is probably the best known version. Robert Bresson, being a follower of the writer, was drawn to this as well, and updated it to a modern (for 1971) France setting that counts as some of his fans' favourite works, although not everyone was convinced. For a start, the character of Jacques veers closely to parody, or at least that's the way it looks today, as when he explains his background to Isabelle we are treated to scenes of his activity which might prompt some to growl, "Get a job, hippy!"
What does he get up to? Well, in a no way creepy development he likes to follow young women in the street who catch his eye, and for some reason he thinks this is a swooningly romantic thing to do, as for him the longing for love is at least as satisfying as actually being in love. He feels that way until he meets Marthe, and gets to experience the genuine article, but as the title suggests this simply lasts just over half a week. In truth, Jacques comes across as a bit of a berk, what with his recording of his own voice to listen back to and working on canvasses for literally seconds at a time, adding a few daubs of colour to barely started pictures, and shunning human contact for the most part.
In a weird way he is enjoying his emotional suffering and isolation, but when he gets to encounter this lonely woman he realises what he's been missing. They meet on the bridge every night of their short relationship, and he gets to find out more about her, and so do we. She is pining for her fiancé who has been gone for a year and she feels he has lost interest in her after he fails to meet her on the bridge, yet such is her lack of confidence that she cannot face a life unfulfilled and has decided she'd rather be dead - until she meets Jacques, that it, who provides a shoulder to cry on. Well, not cry exactly because everyone is very restrained in this, but he is sympathetic and admits that over the short period they have known each other that he has fallen in love with her; but is the feeling mutual?
Marthe is a more understandable character than Jacques, but we can see she is similarly discomfited with life and believes she has found a soulmate at last. Maybe she has, and she certainly tells him she is over her fiancé within hours of their meeting, but then an interesting development occurs. We have seen in flashbacks that she lives with her mother, living on her father's paltry alimony, and sees this marriage as a way out of her drudgery, but now that door appears closed her depression has really taken hold. This means that naturally we feel sorry for Marthe in a way that we don't for Jacques, but as the story progresses what has been rather cold and distant in the Bresson manner begins to tug at the heartstrings. By the ending, it is not Marthe we are feeling for but the hapless Jacques, and an unexpectedly moving tone has crept up on you; it's a simple tale on the surface, but that belies its depth.
