As I wrote of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne in a review of the film,

One of Robert Bresson's most incandescent works, this early film also marks the teaming of two of France's most personal and idiosyncratic artists: Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, whose 1949 film Orpheus (Orphée) mesmerized post-World War II audiences in addition to his numerous other accomplishments, wrote the dialogue for Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, loosely based on Denis Diderot's short story Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître. Elina Labourdette plays Agnès, a young woman who has been forced into a life of prostitution in wartime Vichy, France, in order to support herself and her ailing mother (Lucienne Bogaert). At the same time, Hélène (the serpentine Maria Casarès) is breaking up with her longtime lover, Jean (Paul Bernard), and, feeling jilted by him, concocts an elaborate plot for revenge. Contacting Agnès and her mother, Hélène offers to take over their debts, move them out of the brothel they call home, and set them up in a sleek, modern apartment, with no strings attached. We discover too late Hélène's true motives; she is doing all of this so that Jean will “accidentally” meet Agnès, fall in love with her, marry her, and then become the subject of public ridicule because of Agnès’ past. All of this goes off with clockwork precision, but Jean, when confronted with the monstrousness of Hélène's treachery, shakes off his bourgeois prudishness, embraces Agnès despite her fall from grace, and the film ends on a note of hope and Bressonian redemption. (Dixon 1999) This unique collaboration between Cocteau and Bresson would be a oneoff in every sense of the term. Bresson's later “stripped down” style, so brilliantly presented in such films as Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped or: The Wind Bloweth Where it Listeth, 1956), Pickpocket (1959), Mouchette (1967) and his other mature films was directly at odds with the studied artificiality of Cocteau's brittle, yet transcendent vision.