Mouchette [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Robert Bresson

Overview

Robert Bresson directed this grim but moving story of a girl forced to grow up quickly due to the unfortunate circumstances which surround her. Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is a fourteen year old girl living in a rural village in France; while it's the mid-1960's, in many respects her community looks as if it could still be World War II, or even the turn of the century, and a number of the men earn their living though poaching game. Mouchette's mother (Marie Cardinal) is slowly dying of an incurable illness, while her father (Paul Hebert) is a heavy drinker who shows little concern for his daughter, often using a hard shove as a parenting technique. Mouchette is an outcast at school, works odd jobs to help her family's meager circumstances, and has developed a thinly veiled contempt for most of those around her. One of the few places Mouchette feels at home is in the woods, and when a heavy storm breaks out while she's making her way home from school, she happens upon Arsene (Jean-Claude Guilbert), a poacher who allows her to stay in his cabin for the night; he forces himself upon her sexually, but after her initial resistance Mouchette seems to almost welcome his attention. When Mouchette is made party to an act of violence between Arsene and a rival gamekeeper, she's forced into a complicated lie, and after the death of her mother, her shabby existence becomes almost too much to bear. Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, Mouchette was (like many of Robert Bresson's films) largely cast with non-professional actors, and shot using a deliberately simple, ascetic style; the result was honored with major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival, and was named Best Film of 1967 (along with Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour) by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics.

Product Details

Release Date:	12/08/2020
UPC:	0715515253819
Original Release:	1967
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion
Language:	English
Time:	1:21:00
Sales rank:	410

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Nadine Nortier	Mouchette
Jean-Claude Guilbert	Arsene
Marie Cardinal	Actor,Mother
Jean Vimenet	Mathieu - gamekeeper
Marie Susini	Mathieu's wife
Liliane Princet	Schoolteacher
Raymonde Chabrun	Grocery Shop-owner
Suzanne Huguenin	Undertaker
Marie Trichet	Actor
Robert Bresson	Actor
Paul H?bert	Mouchette's Father
Paul Hebert	Actor
Jean Wiener	Composer

Technical Credits

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson	Screenwriter
Anatole Dauman	Producer

Editorial Reviews

Since his first feature film, 1943's Angels of the Streets, writer-director Robert Bresson specialized in making challenging, somber meditations on spiritual crises. Influenced by the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer (most obviously, The Passion of Joan of Arc), Bresson utilized amateur actors and a sparse visual approach. One of his most controversial, complex deliberations on life was 1967's Mouchette. Based on Georges Bernanos' novel, the film's grim portrayal of a displaced young girl prompted criticism as too bleak, especially compared to the French New Wave films of the era. Like Bresson's other masterpieces, A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, Mouchette is serious, aesthetic cinema at its most interesting and human. Bresson had worked from a Bernanos novel before, with his international breakthrough Diary of a Country Priest.