Film review for "Mouchette"

One of many important film classics that the Criterion DVD Collection offers to cinema aficionados and all those who are interested is Mouchette directed by Robert Bresson in 1967. Mouchette is a story that stems from a literary antecedent written by George Bernanos. It deals with a fourteen year old girl living in poverty. She takes care of her ill mother and nurtures her baby brother, adopting a maternal role that satisfies her for the first half of the film. 

This antihero is introduced to the viewer in a Bressonian manner. Without any establishing shots of locations or introduction of characters, we are placed in a field where the apparent gameskeeper and porter are playing a game of cat-and-mouse, observing each other’s partridge hunting techniques. 

Bresson cuts to shots of the men’s eyes gazing at one another; appealing to voyeurism. This scene’s purpose is only meant to introduce Mouchette and how she herself is an entrapped victim of her succumbing community. It depicts human desperation and the human condition, living in a world where suffering is inevitable. 

Violence is recurrent throughout the film, making Mouchette a target not only by her neglectful parents and society but also playful one in the eyes of a teenage boy who consecutively keeps banging into her as they are playing bumper cars at the fair. The act is physical violence (a.k.a. crashing) but it seems to please her. Mouchette is also targeted when Arsene goes to rape her. She attempts to hide but it seems that she isn’t trying whole heartedly to avoid his pursuit. Even when he is on top of her we don’t see her exhaustively struggling, she rather gives in quickly assuming her fate. 

Whatever events occur in Mouchette happen to teach the main character lessons on sex and death, which is characteristic of 20^th century French cinema.

Environment has an effect on this young girl’s personality. Just as John Locke once stated, our sensorial experiences will shape the person we become. What we experience in our lifetime will unavoidably have an impact on our character and who we are. 

Mouchette, in this case does not inhabit a highly moral community. An illustrating example is when the police is aware of bootlegged alcohol being brought into the local bar late at night and do not bother to interfere. Another is that the entire village seems to know about the love triangle between the barmaid Louisa, Matthieu, and Arsene and treat it as a normal phenomenon. A final example can be that on a fine Sunday morning, while church bells are ringing and the town should be attending communion, Bresson in only interested in showing us the villagers’ leisurely activities at Chez Fernand.

The climatic point in the film is where Mouchette goes wandering off into the forest during a so called “cyclone”. This night is considered to be a psychological rubicon that forever changes her life. It is also when we get to actually hear this unfortunate girl carry out an extensive dialogue with Arsene, the only character in the film that treats her as an equal. This allows the audience to finally have some insight on her thought process. We are given a chance to know what goes on inside Mouchette considering Bresson goes easy on the dialogue throughout the entire film, not making characters speak for no reason.

Mouchette is a child reacting to tragic situations while finding solidarity in evil. This adolescent’s name even hints her position in society, being “little fly” in French. This is something she rejects and protests by stomping her feet more than once in the film.

Mouchette is mainly constructed around the theme of transformation of the soul during the transition from girlhood to adolescence. The question Bresson wishes to address in his work here is “What is left of us when we’re gone?” something Mouchette’s dieing mother asks herself (or God) in the beginning of the film in the midst of prayer in church. Throughout the film, the one who doubtlessly goes missing is Mouchette. 

The reccuring theme of absence is portrayed not only in Mouchette’s disappearance but by her “lover” Arsene who claims he feels absent right before his epileptic attack and also by Mouchette taking her own life in the film’s final scene. 

During this final sequence, Monteverdi’s Magnificat is being played as non-diegetic music. This is said to have a sacred connotation also pointing to Bresson’s personal preferences as a Christian and including his beliefs in his works making him what many call a “Christian artist”. Apart from suicide, which is frowned upon in Christian faith, the afterlife is a promised land that is ultimately better than life itself. To come to a clear deduction, we can presume that Mouchette is looking for better life quality by ending hers entirely. Not being fazed by death, she decides to commit suicide by rolling in a pond and subsequently drowning. This isn’t necessarily shown by Bresson, which is characteristic of him leaving viewers to infer. He films her rolling into the lake, we hear a splash, and then we are given a shot of the lake with ripples. This is a sacralized symbolic moment where Mouchette has broken free from the trap that is her life. 

The language of this moving picture indicates that its narrative is linear as time runs forward chronologically and the events follow the basic structure of: equilibrium, a crisis occurring, and the crisis being somewhat resolved. The events are therefore linked by cause and effect.  The sound in this film is very pure and true; it usually comes from identifiable sources. Music is used to transform, according to Bresson, not underscore or emphasize a situation. Background music isn’t added on as an ornament to beautify or idealize the motion picture in any fashion. On the topic of production, this film was shot on location, without the use of a constructed Hollywood set, which made it realistic and more concentrated on the people at hand and on humanity.

Bresson stresses the “figure, expression & movement” element of mise-en-scene. His inspiration from painting is evidently manifested in his compositions. A painter has to decide what to include in his canvas, and now as a filmmaker in a shot. We see his artistic abilities when Mouchette is throwing dirt on her classmates. We are invited to look only where the dirt lands (ex: student’s school bag or student’s back).  Bresson pays close attention to form since composition in his perspective must express something and value an idea.

Bresson’s films, such as the one in question, require conscious participation by the viewer to extract any value from what is being presented. He has the capability to turn a hot medium into a cool one (in the words of Marshall McLuhan). Bresson takes moving images far beyond stimulating just one sense (vision). He is clearly conscious of his power as a mediator between the viewer and the reality he chooses to expose.  With this in mind, he strictly orchestrates all of the actor’s movements by even numbering their footsteps and making diagrams on the floor to guide their path. Also, since they are not trained professionals, he lets their true personality shine through the characters in a limited context. This is Bresson’s idea of "cinematography" that doesn’t have anything to do with its usual definition of “camerawork”. It was a discovery process for Bresson to use non-professional actors or what he referred to as "models" to capture the true essence of a person. He rejected the idea of the viewer being distracted by a known face or bringing to mind another film they starred in. He was against storyboards and accepted new ideas as they came from the novelty cast. “Films can only be made by bypassing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are”, claims the French auteur.

Some editing techniques adopted by Bresson include the shot-reverse shot and graphic matching. Although the shot-reverse-shot method is also used in Hollywood films, here he plays with mise-en-scene simultaneously, adding objects in the way of two people conversing creating a visual obstruction. He also uses graphic matching when he transitions from the scene where Mouchette is pushed onto a church fountain by her father, which she brushes off by performing a Christian ritual to a mid-shot of her washing her hands in the sink of the bar and wiping them on her apron. 

The DVD of this film is accompanied by numerous supplemental features. These include an audio commentary by renowned film scholar Tony Rayns, a half-hour documentary about the director called Au hasard Bresson, a segment from the cine-magazine TV series Cinéma entitled “Traveling,” featuring on-set interviews with Bresson and actors Nadine Nortier and Jean-Claude Guilbert, and the original theatrical trailer by Jean-Luc Godard.

Out of all the special features presented on this DVD, the two I considered being the most important were the audio commentary and the Au hasard Bresson documentary.

Getting additional information on the film’s entirety was a plus. In these supplementary features, noteably the commentary, we are guided through every scene that is being deconstructed by Rayns. In the documentary, we are given the filmmaker’s perspective on the film and beneficial insight that is highly informative. We also get to watch Bresson at work directing the cast and most importantly Nadine Nortier who plays Mouchette. Here we bare witness to how important the notion of movement is to Bresson. In addition, it familiarizes the audience with the “Bressonian” approach to filmmaking.

 Watching concrete bonus material can increase one’s knowledge and appreciation of cinema in general because it gives the viewers all the extra information they need to have a whole encompassed view of the film. The commentary is not the Hollywood style we are used to that is unecassary, where the actors discuss difficulties in shooting certain scenes or have simple conversation on movie making in general.

Even if this film appears to follow a coherent chronological order, the themes addressed are presented in a complex yet realist fashion. In brief, the special features annexed by the Criterion Collection are of imperative importance to the viewer who wishes to truly understand the film in its entirety, as a work of art.