[2][3] It was Bresson's first film in colour and adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1876 short story "A Gentle Creature", moving the setting from 19th century Saint Petersburg to contemporary Paris.

The couple first meets when she[a] appears in Luc's pawnshop, selling belongings of her deceased family to finance her studies.

The marriage soon becomes strained, as Luc loves his dreamy, sensitive wife in a possessive, narcissistic way and tries to control her.

[4] The film's title he saw as ironic, agreeing with interviewer Charles Thomas Samuels's observation that the female character is "a terrible person in a way" and her suicide "a hostile act, dooming [her husband] to an eternity of grief unmitigated by understanding".

A Gentle Woman premiered in France at the Director's Fortnight in May 1969[5] and in the US at the New York Film Festival in September the same year.