| |
Mouchette
|
|
| Year: |
1967
|
|
Director: |
Robert Bresson
|
| Stars: |
Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Marie Cardinal, Paul Hebert, Jean Vimenet, Marie Susini, Liliane Princet, Suzanne Huguenin, Marine Trichet, Raymonde Chabrun
|
| Genre: |
Drama |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 2 votes) |
| Review: |
In rural France, a small village houses both Mouchette (Nadine Nortier), a young teenage girl who is ostracised by her peers, and Arsene (Jean-Claude Guilbert), who is a local poacher, and sets snares and traps around the surrounding area to catch quails and rabbits - he's not above shooting them either, if he gets the chance. Mouchette has to look after her mother, who is dying of cancer, and also her baby brother, but her abusive father is more interested in the bottle than he is in taking care of his family, and Mouchette suffers for it. That's not all she suffers for, as she has been made to be put through an ordeal in life, and nothing will alleviate that...
Oh, how she suffers, in writer and director Robert Bresson's drama, one of those efforts the auteur created seemingly to be termed austere, no matter what he made, not that the word was in any way inaccurate over the course of his career output. Having put a donkey through Hell in his immediately previous film, Au hasard Balthazar, it was the turn of a young girl, and the relish the filmmaker set about his task was verging on the unseemly - famously, Jean-Luc Godard cut a satirical trailer for this which called it "Christian and Sadistic" as if those two things were synonymous. After this was concluded, you did rather see that trickster Godard's point.
Bresson was, of course, a devout Catholic, and it made sense in his worldview to regard spiritual, and indeed physical torture as a trial worth enduring since there would be a reward in Heaven at the end of the experience, though that did render the grand finale - the final shot, in fact - both predictable in light of his faith, and surprising he thought this was a reasonable act after all Mouchette had been through. Surely every good Catholic is aware that considering self-destruction is a sin? And a pretty major sin, at that, making an unhappy ending even more so when you contemplate what would happen next if Bresson's view of the world was in any was accurate, spiritually speaking.
Before that, the audience had to suffer too, as Mouchette was as shameless a tearjerker as anything Margaret Sullavan appeared in. For the first half hour, you could believe the film was set in some nineteenth century village, so spartan were the living conditions and attitudes of those around our heroine, but then all of a sudden the fair is in town, and she has a go on the dodgems. Finally, a spot of modern-day fun for this miserable specimen! She even attracts the attention of a nice young man, and once the dodgemry is over, she moves to go over and talk to him, but then as if Bresson couldn't stand to see her enjoy herself, Mouchette's father intervenes sharply, slaps her about the face and sends her back to the bar where she has a job - giving every franc of her earnings to him, naturally.
There appears to be no way out of her predicament, as the director applies the figurative thumbscrews and makes her time on Earth ever more intolerable. But what of Arsene? She witnesses him murdering the gamekeeper and becomes weirdly complicit in the crime when the poacher rapes her in an attempt to keep her quiet, though there is an ambiguity in just how much she accepts this assault once it is underway. No longer a virgin, she is labelled a slut by the villagers, the worst thing you can be if you're female apparently, and again she has no recourse to retaliate, painted into a corner by the locals' hardline morality that she cannot stand up against, since they need their scapegoat to kick around to make themselves feel a whole lot better. This hypocrisy is enough to have Bresson cover his amateur leading lady's face in glycerin tears yet again (Nortier never made another movie, indeed she completely disappeared from the limelight), but not enough to have him examine the real architect of her misery: Bresson himself, this story's Almighty. For some, impeccably moving, for others, as Godard said, merely sadistic.
[The Criterion Collection release this on Blu-ray with these features:
Blu-ray: New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Audio commentary from 2006 by film scholar, critic, and festival programmer Tony Rayns
Au hasard Bresson (1967), a documentary by Theodor Kotulla, featuring director Robert Bresson on the set of Mouchette
Segment of a 1967 episode of the French television series Cinéma, featuring on-set interviews with Bresson and actors Nadine Nortier and Jean-Claude Guilbert
Original theatrical trailer, cut by Jean-Luc Godard
PLUS: An essay by critic and poet Robert Polito.]
|
| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
|
| |
|
|
Display comments