Mouchette

Robert Bresson is one of the most idiosyncratic directors in cinema, fascinated more by the purity of theme than by embellished or larger-than-life actors, so he always enlisted non-actors and directed with a stoic style, preferring impressionistic, blank expressions to contortions of anger or joy. This rigidity crafted far more than one masterpiece, since A Man Escaped is well worth anyone’s time in its indictment of the prison systems in France, but perhaps Bresson’s most humane work lies in the story of a put upon young girl by the titular name of Mouchette (1967). This is a film that chronicles the degradation inflicted upon the young girl, who is left to either channel that pain out onto others, or to introject and absorb all of the agony into her very person.

Yet despite the seeming fatalism of the end, the film itself is not fatalistic. There are beautiful segments that express vindication and sweet euphoria for young Mouchette. Specifically, the bumper car sequence, long cited as a demonstration of the town taking out its frustration on her, does yield the potential for joy, in that the boy who's expressing his attraction to her through continuous car humping doesn't seem like that bad of a man, all things considered. Rather, it's the systemic denial of autonomy from her family that largely precludes her ability to find an alternate voice to liberate her.

Furthermore, the gentleman who rapes her even seems to almost exist as that harbinger, since his presence initially offers Mouchette a secret and thus private knowledge apart from her familial ways. Of course, the denial of that possibility comes in how he abuses her (though my sole complaint is that she could have run out the door rather than chosen to hide under the wooden table). Regardless, the communal degradation that she feels offsets this mild criticism, since the case could be made that she allows herself to be treated as the inferiority that she's internalized from everyone, which gives her cause to not escape such a fate.

The ending, then, speaks of the power Bresson could utilize when he wanted, as there's still that glimmer, that potential, for reconciliation that gives the film its humanity. Mouchette simply turns the same blind eye to that potential that others have turned toward her, finally introjecting her lack of possibility into a liberation of her spirit.

Mouchette: 10/10