Mouchette (1967)

Bresson one of the true architects of modern cinema found in this story the perfect distillation of form and content coupling his pared down style with the poignant story of a young french girl trying to live through impoverished circumstances and doing her best to survive. Being one of my heroes I have always had nothing but total respect for the way he intellectualized every aspect of film-making without denuding it of emotional impact. A chemist of cinematic ingenuity there will never be a more profoundly personal look at cinema than that of Bresson. May the film-makers of today at least make the effort to rob from this man. Viva Bresson!

Fmovies: Mouchette is a young girl living in the country. Her mother is dying and her father does not take care of her. Mouchette remains silent in the face of the humiliations she undergoes. One night in a wood, she meets Arsene, the village poacher, who thinks he has just killed the local policeman. He tries to use Mouchette to build an alibi.

Robert Bresson knows how to make anything look beautiful. I always feel that black and white captures a scene better than color ever will, especially if the director (or cinematographer) knows how to really use the light and shadow Bresson gets it, and has always gotten it. He also seems to know ho to use children without exploiting them or making them overly sympathetic characters. The character of Mouchette is in many ways the queen of her own world... even if it may not be the best world.

It seems entirely appropriate that the film opens with the metaphor of birds being snared as this seems to apply not only to Mouchette's life, but to Bresson's approach to the viewer as well.

For what, after all, is the director attempting to do here? Are we really to regard this as an unblinking gaze into the life of an abused, outcast girl? If so, why is Bresson so intent on excluding even the most fleeting moments of joy (or at least humor) that enter even the darkest of lives (I believe a philosopher once said "alas, joy too must have its day")? It is pretty telling that the one scene involving happiness for Mouchette is the most monotonous and lifeless in the picture (the bumper cars). Not only are we not allowed to experience her joy, but Bresson is careful to distance us from the real experience of her pain as well. This is done by the use of "gestures" (particularly prominent in Bresson's later films) that "signify" a character's experience rather than giving us the person's individualized emotional and visceral reactions to events. Thus the assault on Mouchette is shown in a distant, almost pantomimed manner, her relationship with her father is suggested by dropping coins in his hand, a disembodied hand slapping her face, etc. So, are we really to identify with Mouchette, to feel her pain, seeing how her experience of life intersects with our own in only the most symbolic, muted fashion? Is this really "compassion" and is this really Bresson's purpose?

Or is Mouchette a figure that Bresson uses (and dehumanizes), as literally every character in the movie uses her, to achieve other purposes? In this case the selling of a particular view of the world. One which sees the world as a snare, both in its joy and its pain, that is "saved" only by the (symbolic) suffering of the innocent, and transcended/transformed only by death. In other words a viewpoint that that advocates looking beyond (or turning away from)life to find "transcendent" truths. A view based on judgement rather than acceptance. And if this is "the truth" why must so much of what we experience as truth (such as joy, intimacy, occasional feelings of "oneness" with the world) be so forcibly excluded? Are these all really illusions, the world simply a snare? And without acceptance of ALL of Mouchette's reality can she,or any of us, really be redeemed?

Yes, Bresson is a meticulous, incisive, and occasionally powerful filmaker. But is he really honest? Are there some TRUTHS that he can't face (and so desperately restricts his view). In MOUCHETTE we are a little more aware of the puppeteer's strings than usual. 7 out of 10.

Mouchette fmovies. Until now Robert Bresson has been one of those classic directors who have failed to connect with me. With Au Hasard Balthazar and Pickpocket, I've found his style over-simplified, bland and plodding. While Balthazar didn't work for me at all, Pickpocket had moments where it showed potential but then it was quickly squandered and taken in a different direction. Here with Mouchette, his style is finally working. It's a film utterly drenched in sorrow and pain. Through the protagonists' squirming and rebelling from her struggles, her actions are a catharsis from the frustrations of life and when she's punished for them, it digs deep. Although the storytelling techniques are similar to the films I didn't care much for, what elevates Mouchette is the passionate performances and the crisp photography. While I do regret that it's so brief, Mouchette is a brilliant portrayal of a truly tragic figure that faces the hardships and inevitable moral dilemmas of life. I'm very glad Bresson has warmed up to me as he's got many films I'm really looking forward to, such as A Man Escaped and Lancelot du Lac.

8/10

Among the best things that can happen to me as a viewer is to watch a filmmaker grow into mastery, and I've just gone through a series of viewing where Bresson grew before my eyes. He wasn't a master before Balthazar in my estimation but he was one now.

See, he had started with ambitious work in Diary of a Priest, but something must have troubled him, the spiritual search was coming off as emotional anguish, resulting in sentimentality. His next three were all about finding ways to quell this, fasting the eye, muting the emotion.

This is all the more reason to celebrate him, because it could have gone either way. He could have turned out film after film where he mutes expression and turns actors into bare stumps and called it pure. But if this was purity, where was the life in which the pure is woven through? Bresson matters I believe because he left the stone floor of his ascetic phase to grow into this, his sculpting phase.

This is a sculpture of moving image and sound, even more so than Balthazar, even more purely about the rooms and spaces in which a young girl faces the duplicity of life. It's all in how he chisels the air with the camera, he does this in three parts.

The day before, with its moments of small everyday cruelty and unexpected kindness alike. She has a beautiful voice but won't sing with her classmates until forced, a passing woman unexpectedly gives her money for the bumping cars, but her dalliance with a boy is cut short and she has to go sit with her father. It's heart-aching because all she needs is someone to mind her and no one does outside of making her behave how they want to, most of us have been savaged this way as kids.

The night of unfathomable emotions out in the woods, and look how masterfully. Why she does what she does in the cabin, why she swears to protect his secret and professes love, perhaps intuitively protecting herself, perhaps asserting herself against authority, this is all as unfathomable as why the man goes back out to commit violence. It's all in that shot where the two men laugh, for no reason other than all this being absurd, beneath a dark sky, and the wind that blows all through the night.

In the third part of the film we have the day after, with this complicated human nature brought to the stark light of what other people think. Bresson shows us judgment and cynicism, and even the old woman's advice about death is waved off; too musty for a young girl, more advice.

So how poignant to see this shift in Bresson? He gives us by the end a more eloquent Jeanne D'arc, now the dogmatist interrogators become your small-minded neighbors and Joan is neither pure nor certain in any way about the truth of what she experienced. No ceremonial death. And how deep it cuts, that she may have wanted to ask her mother for advice, unburden the confusion, but has to go through it alone.

So after a series of Bresson viewings, I will come to rest here. Antonioni would take home the Palm that year but Bresson had conquered his obstacles and arrived fully. The title of Tarkovsky's book best describes what he does here, and you can see the Tati influence as a new tool that he didn't have back in Pickpocket. He sculpts an external time, but now in such a way that the pure is found where it grows roots and rustles, among life.

It would be Tarkovsky's turn now to shoulder this legacy, and Dreyer's, asking himself, what kind of time? We dream and yearn with an asymmetric logic and mi

Never before has cinema been this simple and honest. No one makes films with more emotion than Bresson and no one puts less emotion in their films than he. I could cite so many Bressonian cliches and talk of his uniquely personal style which by 1967 was firmly established, especially since he had abandoned the voice-over he used in the 50s. I will point out his use of sound and approach to acting which remain so distinctive and by now so familiar. There is nothing in Mouchette that is new, especially after Balthazar, what remains is the story of Mouchette, told with the utter grace and passion that makes this film a masterpiece that transcends technique, even cinema itself, and makes most cinema look frivolous in the process.

Finally I must mention the films ending, which I rank with that of Balthazar as the most beautiful I have seen.