Sixteen years after having successfully exploited Georges Bernanos' universe for his "Journal d'Un Curé De Campagne" (1951), Robert Bresson appropriates once again another book by the French writer: "Mouchette" for a very personal, stylish rendering and a canonical film about stolen childhood. The filmmaker always supported that he'd prefer a film to be felt rather than to be understood. Needless to say we leave the projection with a big emotion inside us and we also feel helpless about Mouchette' terrible life. According to Bresson, Mouchette's tragic fate enabled him to put forward "misery, cruelty. They're everywhere: wars, tortures, murders".
The film starts with Arsène's and the gamekeeper's eyes staring at quails and partridges that desperately try to free themselves from snares. This harrowing introduction sequence sets the scene for what follows after wards. How not to think of a metaphor for Mouchette's life that offers her no horizon and no hope? This teenage girl is all alone and in spite of her young age, she has to take care of her sick mother, her alcoholic father and her baby brother. She goes to school but feels rejected by her female fellow students, notably when school's over, they stone her. It's the same thing every day and Mouchette is trapped in her loneliness. That's why the sequence at the fair comes as a sort of relief for her. The scene at the bumper cars provides her momentary solace and joy. Then, the key sequence with Arsène will make her open her eyes about what she really wants. In spite of her poverty and solitude, Mouchette needs to love but where to find it in a hostile world?
Mouchette strongly belongs to the Bressonian world. She's an outcast and she can't integrate herself to her surrounding. Once again, Bresson underscores the opposition between a pure, subjective person and an objective, hostile world in a sparse, minimal directing with a supremacy granted to images and sounds and the evident symbols they convey. An eloquent example would be when the little girl is all alone in the country and can hear the sound of guns and can see rabbits running or dying. She hasn't got a friend or even one member of her family to talk to. When she wants to tell her mother what Arsène did to her, she dies. Fate dogs her. There's no room for the weak and there's one last exit left... Bresson's austere, intensely visual making fits the story and its themes like a glove and if you don't feel anything during the last sequence, you have a heart of stone.
The film starts with Arsène's and the gamekeeper's eyes staring at quails and partridges that desperately try to free themselves from snares. This harrowing introduction sequence sets the scene for what follows after wards. How not to think of a metaphor for Mouchette's life that offers her no horizon and no hope? This teenage girl is all alone and in spite of her young age, she has to take care of her sick mother, her alcoholic father and her baby brother. She goes to school but feels rejected by her female fellow students, notably when school's over, they stone her. It's the same thing every day and Mouchette is trapped in her loneliness. That's why the sequence at the fair comes as a sort of relief for her. The scene at the bumper cars provides her momentary solace and joy. Then, the key sequence with Arsène will make her open her eyes about what she really wants. In spite of her poverty and solitude, Mouchette needs to love but where to find it in a hostile world?
Mouchette strongly belongs to the Bressonian world. She's an outcast and she can't integrate herself to her surrounding. Once again, Bresson underscores the opposition between a pure, subjective person and an objective, hostile world in a sparse, minimal directing with a supremacy granted to images and sounds and the evident symbols they convey. An eloquent example would be when the little girl is all alone in the country and can hear the sound of guns and can see rabbits running or dying. She hasn't got a friend or even one member of her family to talk to. When she wants to tell her mother what Arsène did to her, she dies. Fate dogs her. There's no room for the weak and there's one last exit left... Bresson's austere, intensely visual making fits the story and its themes like a glove and if you don't feel anything during the last sequence, you have a heart of stone.