14. Mouchette

by Allan Fish

(France 1967 81m) DVD1/2

Going out like Mouchette

p Robert Bresson d/w Robert Bresson ph Ghislain Cloquet ed Raymond Lamy, Robert Bresson   m Monteverdi, Jean Wiener art Pierre Charbonnier

Nadine Nortier (Mouchette), Jean-Claude Guilbert (Arsène), Marie Cardinal (mother), Paul Hébert (father),

It was only a few years ago that Robert Bresson’s masterwork was referenced by another eclectic European director, Bernardo Bertolucci. In his film The Dreamers the principals discuss the final scene of Bresson’s film and “going out like Mouchette.” The film did quite well, both critically and financially, but how many people got the reference? I think most of the audience would have been under forty and thus would not have recognised the reference, going to Bertolucci’s film purely for the talked of sex and nudity. The intellectual central trio in Bertolucci’s film loved cinema, every aspect of it, and could reference everything as far back as Queen Christina and Blonde Venus. Today, the so-called movie intellectuals couldn’t go back any further than Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese and Coppola. We live in a sad world. All of which goes doubly for the protagonist of Bresson’s film. It has often been called one of the great studies about adolescence, and yet really it isn’t. It’s great, yes, but has nothing really to do with adolescence, rather about loneliness, alienation and premature adulthood. As a film about teenage alienation it has no peers, with its heroine not so much not belonging as not being wanted at all.

Mouchette is a 14 year old inarticulate peasant girl who lives in a small French rural village where the only pastimes seem to be drinking liquor and poaching. Her mother has given birth to a child, but is too ill to care for it. Her father can only think of his next drink and making Mouchette slave away in a local café to give him extra money to do some more drinking. At school she is ostracised by the children and treated like dirt by her teacher, who loves nothing more than ritually humiliating her for singing flat. She even tries to help an epileptic poacher, who thanks her by raping her, after which she still tries to help him, and gets called a slut by a shopkeeper for her troubles. Finally she decides she has had enough and ends her life by rolling voluntarily into the river and drowning.

Bresson’s world is an uncaring, bleak one, with virtually no hope. With her patched up coat, oversized clogs, unflattering ribbons in her hair and tatty woollen stockings, she is the personification of the outsider. Her suffering is hard to watch, but has an almost religious simplicity to it that is deeply moving. Indeed, when Time Out’s Wally Hammond compared her suffering to a parable with each individual misery like one of the Stations of the Cross one can see where he’s coming from, especially when accompanied by Monteverdi’s austere music. In truth, though, Mouchette has as much contempt for religion as for every other part of her life.

Visually the film is hard to forget, filled with the same sense of stark beauty and economy of expression as on his previous masterpiece, Au Hasard, Balthazar and as photographed by the same cameraman it looks a picture. Nothing is said in the film that needn’t be, and often it is said by the slightest gesture. As the eponymous luckless girl, Nadine Nortier is hard to forget, living in a downward spiral of hopelessness and misery. She briefly, ever so fleetingly, gets a chance of happiness when she goes for a ride on the dodgems and one young man seems to take an interest in her. She even smiles on occasion, but her hopes are cruelly dashed by her dear old father. Of the films by the master in this selection it’s possibly the darkest and, along with the aforementioned Balthazar, the most moving. It’s the sort of film to subject anyone to who calls themselves a lover of cinema. If they are unmoved and unimpressed by Bresson’s film I can only advise them, while accounting for taste, to never call themselves a cinema lover again and go back to Bruce Willis where they belong. This is real cinema, authentic, gut-wrenching and overflowing with truth.