davikubrick
Bresson is known for heartbreaking films such as Au Hasard Balthazar but I believe he got the best of himself with this film. As most of Bresson, the film uses the characters hands and behavior to "explain" them. Mouchette's life is a tragedy: she suffers but yet she will not complain. She has no future, she is a lost person in the world. Even thought Bresson's style may seem too cold, it may be, but it is incredibly affective. Bresson made a film about a tragedy that is not just from this suffered and misunderstood young girl but of a lot of persons: wanting to be accepted but humiliation is what she receives as an answer. "Mouchette" is one of the most powerful films in cinema history, it is moving without being forced and one of the most well developed tragic characters from cinema.
Pierre_D
Mouchette is a young girl living in an indeterminate village in France. Her mother is dying, her younger sibling needs constant care and her father is an abusive drunk. Her life consists of going to school, where she will never fit in because of her one piece of clothing and taciturn behaviour, and then going home through the fields next to the school.Mouchette's expressions tell all you need to know. She speaks perhaps a dozen words throughout the film but you feel her joy as she is allowed to play bumper cars at the carnival, to her frustration after her father refuses her any more amusement, to her fear and agony as she falls victim to a man she thought she could trust. In an environment where the church and patriarchy hang above any woman's head, this is not an easy life by far.The film reaches its zenith when Mouchette has to hide from a heavy rainstorm on the way back home. She loses one of her galoshes and a poacher named Arsène (who splendidly recreates an epileptic seizure), takes her to his cabin to warm her and speak to her about his fight with the gamekeeper. The price for his help is enormous and breaks the young girl beyond repair. She tries to speak to her mother about it, but mother is dying. Her father and brother mistrust her. When her mother dies, finally the neighborhood shows a little compassion, but this turns to judgment and even a gift of new clothing cannot reconcile her to her peers.The final scene is epochal, with Mouchette rolling around in the grass (apparently pleasurably) before we see she is trying to reach a certain area, to tragic results.Mouchette is suffering, isolation and a small dash of hope, and a must see film.
rowmorg
It's hard to believe that Robert Bresson could muster a strong cast and create a powerful drama with a few dollars, when James Cameron could not do it with $200 million. Bresson simply uses the powerful imagery of a gutsy writer, Georges Bernanos, and makes his film in a rural context of unchanging basic values and prejudices.I have no idea what happened to his lead, Nadine Nortier, but she seems never to have appeared in another film --- that has to be most unusual for an actress showing such talent. Her ravisher, Jean-Claude Guilbert, also seems never to have acted again. So here we have two excellent performances from amateurs who never acted again (as far as we can tell), working for a brainy French film-maker who made 16 feature-films in his 98 year-long life.The directorial method consists of as little dialogue as possible, and plenty of symbolic actions, often balancing out in different scenes. Bresson is working in the Euro-world of other heavies such as Ingmar Bergman, and money has nothing to do with it. It's a world of ideas and movements.In Mouchette, a pubescent girl in a disadvantaged situation is misused by a drunken fellow villager. Her very difficult and complicated night trying both to live up to her idea of womanhood and to fend off her rapist creates great conflict within her that after a couple of days trying to cope she deals with by self-destruction.An unhappy ending usually spells death for all but very particular films, and this one is cited by Criterion as a world classic, but can only muster 15 comments on IMDb. So we see that few are interested in the work of big minds.
makpet
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!
AD
