MOUCHETTE Movie Review

A lonely 14-year-old French girl (Nadine Nortier), daughter of an alcoholic father and a terminally ill mother, exhausts her capacity to live with her spiritual and emotional pain. Based on the novel La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos, Bresson's film is a structurally simple yet emotionally complex portrait of a tortured soul achieving redemption and release though the only means she believes to be available. In an interview, director Robert Bresson described the title character's larger significance: “Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.” This is a film about suffering, and though it's a magnificent, overpowering experience—perhaps even a transcendental one—it requires as much dedication on the part of the viewer as Bresson summoned in creating it.

NEXT STOP … Diary of a Country Priest, Une Femme Douce, Day of Wrath

1967 80m/B FR Nadine Nortier, Maria Cardinal, Paul Hebert; D: Robert Bresson; C: Ghislan Cloquet. VHS FCT, TPV, HTV