The severity of Bresson's style has earned his films the reputation, depending on whom you read, of being exquisitely or pretentiously boring. In fact, in my sense of it, the opposite is true. There is hardly an uncharged moment in Bresson's meticulous and provocative mise en scène. My sense is that certain audiences experience Bresson as boring because his films, while appearing simple, demand so much of the eye. Boredom serves as a means of deflecting pressure.

In Four Nights of a Dreamer, it is as if Bresson's influence on Godard had filtered back to him in a kind of circular pollination. A comedy … adapted and updated from the Dostoevsky story "White Nights," Four Nights of a Dreamer is Bresson's most contemporary film in style and setting. It is also the austere filmmaker's most ungrudgingly beautiful and accessible work. (p. 450)

Whereas in the tragic films, Bresson's isolated...