Director
James, the supervisor of an agricultural colony, is in love with Hélène, who is unfortunately meant for another. At Hélène's engagement party, James has an argument with her fiancé. When the latter gets mysteriously killed, James is arrested and condemned to twenty years of hard labor. Hélène is convinced James is innocent but she falls under the control of a gold digger who has set up a dummy company with the money stolen from James. The swindler is finally arrested and Hélène and James are reunited.
Cinematography
"Taking its title from John Keats’s early 19th-century poem, this highly personal melodrama finds Dulac interrogating the archetype of the femme fatale. La belle dame sans merci follows a famous actress who was once seduced and abandoned by a rich man and subsequently resolved to become a “merciless woman,” forever scheming to hurt others (men in particular) in a ruthless yet captivating manner. Dulac challenges the Romantic archetype embodied in Keats’s poem by way of symbolist mise en scène, self-reflexive narration, and her typically associative approach to editing, locating a modern ambiguity within the stereotypical figures of 19th-century art." - Film Society of Lincoln Center
