Robert Bresson | Mouchette / 1967, USA 1970

without a shadow

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, and director) Mouchette / 1967, USA 1970

 

Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette (released in the US in March 1970) is one of his most despairing of his oeuvre, but yet is one of his most celebratory of life. Based, like his Diary of a Country Priest, on a novel by Georges Bernanos, Mouchette, almost without plot, is the story of a fourteen-year-old school girl (Nadine Nortier) who lives in a dilapidated farm house with her dying mother, her alcoholic father, brother, and a new-born baby brother, for whose care she is responsible. Unhappy at home, mocked by her school-girl peers, and unable to participate—both financially and spiritually—in any the limited joys available to her, Mouchette, as Bresson himself described her, is “evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.”

     Like most of Bresson’s suffering figures, she nonetheless is more than resilient, ignoring and battling her schoolgirl companions and the neighborhood boys in their taunts. In a stunning scene at a weekend carnival, Bresson reveals the possibilities of her life through the movement of Dodg’em cars: at first her car is simply hit by others again and again, but gradually, as she spots and starts to flirt with a handsome boy in another “auto,” manipulating her car into position to successfully crash into his and others’ cars. Later, as she begins to trail after the young man, she is quickly pulled aside by her ever-watchful father and struck in the face.

     Bresson films this young woman’s abuse with an almost abstract, “flat” directorial eye, allowing his non-actors (he chose evidently an entirely amateur cast) to reveal their own stories in action, since they are quite clearly a people of few words. Yet the actions in which they engage are anything but uneventful. Luisa, the local bartender is courted by the gamekeeper Mathieu, but is obviously more attracted to the small-time poacher Arsène. Like Mouchette, who occasionally helps out in the bar to earn her family a few more coins, Luisa’s life is one of repetition and boredom, but in her role as the dispenser of what all the men seek—wine and liquor—she is a woman of power, while Mouchette has so little choice over her life that she hardly casts a shadow.

     As in his other films, Bresson employs the images of hands in this work—the camera follows Luisa’s hands over and over as she pours out the drinks, lingers over Mouchette’s attempts to soothe and heal her mother and to hold and change the diaper of her baby brother, and mocks her father’s bedtime antics of driving a car—but it is the legs and feet of his characters that dominate: the embarrassing slap of Mouchette’s clogs against the earth as she arrives late to school and the later loss of one of those shoes in a storm; the angry crush of dirt into the carpet of an old woman, who late in the film, demands Mouchette ponder her own death.

     What also gives this film such power is the oddity of its few events, particularly the scene beginning with her journey home from school through the woods. In these woods we have already observed several battles—similar to that of Renoir’s Le Règle de jeu—between gamekeeper and poacher, between the pheasants and rabbits inhabiting the place, and those who would take their lives. Caught up in this struggle, Mouchette is forced to take cover under a tree during a rainstorm. Meanwhile, Mathieu and Arsène encounter one another, a fight-in-the-brewing for some time. At first Arsène seems conciliatory, willing to give up his trap. But when it is refused, he pushes the other into a stream where they briefly fight. Yet it is a ludicrous battle they perceive, and it ends with them laughing at each other as they share the wine in Arsène’s cask.

     By the time Arsène comes across Mouchette, however, he is so drunk that he believes he has killed Mathieu. At first he appears solicitous of the young girl, determined to help her find his missing clog, and to have her help him with an alibi. They briefly take cover in a small hut, but after hearing two rifle shots—shots clearly coming from Mathieu’s gun—Arsène insists that they wipe away all evidence of being there and takes her to his own house.

     Again, he seems caring of her situation; but suddenly, in one of the strangest of cinematic events, he undergoes an epileptic fit. As she has previously nursed her mother, Mouchette holds his head, wiping away the blood and spittle that issues from the poacher’s mouth. It is as if she can find no other role in her life but that of caregiver; little is ever offered in return. And with Arsène’s revival comes the inevitable. She now fears for her own safety and, somewhat lamely perhaps—given both her need for love and her expectations of the abuse—attempts to fend him off before finally, as he begins the rape, accepting him in an embracing hug. In short, it is the very “strangeness” of these scenes that make them appear to be so inevitable, as if these events were too odd to be anything but the “truth.”

     When Mouchette finally returns home, the baby is bawling, her mother near death. She cannot even find a match in the house to warm the milk. In the night la mère dies.

     The next morning, she is determined to go for the baby’s milk. But this time she encounters, briefly, people who seem willing to help. A grocer offers her coffee and a croissant, but as she attempts to place another croissant into the girl’s pocket, Mouchette backs away—now terrified, evidently, of even human touch. A customer accusatively stares at her as the camera makes apparent what the women observe, the top button of her dress is missing. “Slut,” one of the women hisses.

     Checking up on Mathieu, Mouchette is surprised to see him still living; seeing her there he insists she come into his house to reveal what has occurred during the night. As the gamekeeper and his wife begin to interrogate her, she resists, but ends up by declaring Arsène is now her lover.

     An old friend of the family invites her in to present her with a shroud for her mother and some dresses for the girl herself. But Mouchette is indignant. What can those things mean to her now? Why didn’t the woman help out during her mother’s life? The “friend” is, quite obviously, inured to the dead (“I am a friend of the dead”) rather than to those who are alive.

 

    In world such as Mouchette’s, love and life is squandered, creating a vacuum that offers only a mean death. As she once again crosses the woods on her way home, Mouchette pauses, checking out one of new dresses of the “gift”; like all of her other clothes, it too is quickly torn in the brambles. Wrapping herself in it, Mouchette rolls down the hill toward the stream, but her body comes to a standstill as it reaches the bushes at water’s edge. With new determination, with a will that represents her attempt take back her own life, Mouchette repeats the act, rolling in her new “shroud” down the hill once more, this time hitting the mark, her body falling like a stone into the water from where it will never rise.

     Has the renowned Roman Catholic director now advocated suicide? some viewers asked upon the film’s release. I cannot speak for Bresson. But in such an immoral world, perhaps even self-murder can be seen as a spiritual act.

 

Los Angles, February 28, 2000

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2011).