Mouchette

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Film Description

Gradually destroyed by her life, a downtrodden peasant girl eventually kills herself. Nothing more, nothing less, Mouchette is both her story and our story and Bresson's genius was to find and photograph humanity itself, cutting to the quick of emotional impact with an unmatched visual austerity. Profoundly moving, this is cinema filled with hard-won grace.

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DVD Extras

Restored print; Picture gallery; Bresson filmography.

Technical Details

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2 Stills

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Review by JH on 20th September 2001

Arguably Bresson's greatest film, this portrayal of an articulate marginalised schoolgirl surrounded by alcoholic degenerates and provincial Catholic pieties achieves an intense poetic purity. The depressing miserabilism of an anomic society is transcended by Bressons scrupulous cinematic grace. The grace belongs to a profound humanism beyond the divisions between Christians and atheists. Unable to sing correctly in her music lesson, Mouchette finds the right note when comforting an epileptic mental debile in a lonely shed during her symbolic 'cyclone'. In sullen revolt against all attempts to recuperate her, she finds salvation in a suicide which brings tears of joy to the alarmed viewers eyes. This must be one of the best films ever made.

Review by Michael Whitworth on 20th June 2005

Bresson takes his austere, uncompromising style to new lengths as if setting a test of endurance for his most devoted admirers. Only at the film's devastating conclusion (a key moment in French cinema) does the seeemingly relentless trawl through cruelty and human unkindness make any real sense. It is only when the film is seen a second or third time that Mouchette reveals an aching beauty that is at once profoundly moving and emotionally disquieting. This is a movie that pleas against modern religious piety in a manner so powerful and persuasive it is hard not to feel some sort of redemption at the end of it. They don't call this man the the Dark Catholic for nothing.

Review by Kate Davies on 12th April 2005

No sentiment here!

Mouchette is a sort of listless saint, observing the nasty hypocrisy of her provincial village with detached revulsion. Scoffing at the petty desires and convictions of her community, she aspires beyond the village boundaries, yet becomes a victim of a neglect and cruelty with which she is also (disturbingly) represented as complicit. With his visual idiosyncrasies (lower-body shots, whole scenes made up of glances) and a characteristic focus on stuff (stockings and shoes, water and mud) in Mouchette Bresson created a perfectly realised cinematic world of sensation and affect that never tips over into sentiment. With its effortless formality and an ending that is neither cheerless nor facilely redemptive, this is Bresson at his most marvelous and unsettling.

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Article - "Andrei Tarkovsky - Dreams / Morality / Freedom" by John Davies
Monday 14th May 2007

Andrei Tarkovsky died in 1986 at the age of just 54. His seven feature films, commencing with Ivan's Childhood in 1962, form one of the greatest and most individual bodies of work in cinema. Whether nominally making films in the areas of war, medieval histor...  View article in full

Article - "Robert Bresson: The Cinema of Hidden Souls" by Doug Cummings
Monday 9th May 2005

Some filmmakers are creative tyrants, using cinematic techniques to prescribe emotional reactions. Other filmmakers believe less is more, offering subdued, elliptical, ambiguous works that paradoxically elicit deeper and more enduring feelings. In this latter categor...  View article in full

Article - "Bresson's lucid cinema: Lancelot du Lac and The Devil, Probably" by Jonathan Hourigan
Monday 31st March 2008

Lancelot du Lac

Lancelot du Lac is a towering, luminescent achievement. Bresson’s eleventh feature, his third in colour and the first of three collaborations with the distinguished Italian cinematographer, Pasqualino de Santis, it is amongst Br...  View article in full

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