Robert Bresson was a thoughtful theorist on how to construct a film, but his characters do not resemble flesh-and-blood human beings. The widely praised Mouchette is among the worst offenders.
France
2.5*
Director:
Robert Bresson
Screenwriter:
Robert Bresson
Director of Photography:
Ghislain Cloquet
Running time: 80 minutes
Sometimes, even when confronted with material that ought to bring us to tears, there is no other way to respond than with boundless laughter. This is the case with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, a terribly acted film about an innocent girl enduring one tragedy after another without any hope of salvation.
In a way, the audience should be able to sympathise with her because for them the possibility of salvation is equally elusive. Mouchette is a tragic pile-up of calamities, both in the life of its main character and in the art of filmmaking itself. Transitioning from one disaster (humiliation, death, rape) to the next is just one part of the equation, but Bresson rarely knows how to direct scenes with dialogue and is even worse when it comes to personal interaction.
(In)famous for using non-actors in his film, Bresson gives the titular role to the 16-year-old Nadine Nortier. She had never appeared in a film before and would not do so again. Her character is in a truly miserable situation. With a mother on death’s door and an alcoholic father, she has to take care of her baby brother. She has another brother her own age, but somehow he manages to be absent from most of the film. And because of her simple clothing, clog-like shoes and reserved manner, her classmates and imperious teachers relentlessly pick on her. Of course, as with many other female characters in Bresson’s films (Au hasard Balthazar immediately comes to mind), she bears it all with a brave face but no push-back.
The one glimmer of hope peeking out from among the rubble of the girl’s existence is a bumper car ride. Although the staging lacks even a modicum of creativity, we finally see Mouchette emote without looking like a wooden Bressonian model. A well-dressed young man her age repeatedly bumps into her car, which turns her melancholy into joyful laughter. However, we can’t forget that this is a tragedy with a capital T. The scenes ends almost as quickly as it begins. When she is about to speak to the boy, her drunken father suddenly appears and hits her across the face. She silently yields to his authority and accompanies him back to the bar, albeit with tears streaming down her cheeks.
Halfway through the silent agony that is her existence, Mouchette is raped by a sleazy poacher named Arsène. Fortunately, unlike her counterpart in Balthazar, she doesn’t start dating the rapist. (Although she eventually calls him her lover, her motivation for doing so is much clearer than it was for Balthazar‘s Marie.) But the scene is an absolute farce. Mouchette and Arsène move hesitantly, in slow motion and without emotion towards and away from each other. He weakly grabs at her, she weakly repels him and then silently relents. We only hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace – a shockingly unsavoury metaphor for a director renowned for his use of sound.
Another metaphor – morally less objectionable but even more ham-handed – that the film deploys involves the hunt. In one of the first scenes, we see Arsène setting traps for pheasants. And in the film’s penultimate scene, Mouchette, whose name literally means “little fly”, witnesses a rabbit hunt. The viewer would have to be blind to overlook the explicit comparison.
But what is really grating about the film is Bresson’s apparent inability to create realistic drama. When Mouchette somehow loses her shoe in the mud, she takes a seat a few feet away. Quite a while later, Arsène appears, notices that she has lost her shoe, then takes her to his cabin and leaves her there before going back to the same spot to retrieve the shoe in the middle of a rainstorm. None of this makes any sense. The director so desperately seeks to inject drama into his film that he grasps as wholly incredible straws. Despite some nifty editing, the film’s final scene is not much better.
It boggles the mind why Bresson continues to be hailed as a visionary filmmaker. He certainly benefited from the admiration of the Cahiers crowd, but frankly, he was a one-trick pony. One of his first films, A Man Escaped, released in 1956, was a minimalist but tense work of genius. But it seems like the work of an entirely different and much more capable man than the one who subsequently made Pickpocket (whose interesting visuals barely compensated for the performance of its lead actor), and then Balthazar and Mouchette, both of which contain extraordinarily inept bits of acting throughout.
Mouchette feels out of step with its time, and not in a good way. Except for the bumper cars and the two hunting scenes, there is little dynamism, and a succession of setbacks suggests there is little to hope for and disengages us from the narrative. This little fly deserves to be swatted away.
