Mouchette (1967) The kind of serious art cinema that just isn’t made anymore (Review)

It can be daunting watching a film with a Mouchette-sized reputation. Robert Bresson’s second adaptation of a novel by Georges Bernanos (after 1951’s Diary of a Country Priest) is one of the most acclaimed works from one of France’s most heavyweight directors; it’s been cited as a favourite by everyone from Tsai Ming-Liang to Iain Sinclair. As you swallow your trepidation and sit down to watch Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray, though, spare a thought for the real victims in this and frankly every other situation: movie critics. We have to find something to say about the work of a director who analysed his own work not only in interviews but in the book Notes on the Cinematographer, which earned him a place in film theory history arguably even more exalted than his place in film directing history. I ask you, what is the point?

Well, there’s a number of points. For some people, the point of watching Bresson is to sit and mourn a kind of art cinema that serious culture once revolved around, but which now seems to be on life support. This kind of attitude, though, can obscure why films like Mouchette mattered so much on release. Bresson wasn’t making films to appeal to a high-toned form of nostalgia (Only True ’60s Kids Will Remember These Existentialist Art Films!), he was making films to tackle the world he and his audiences lived in. This shines through in perhaps the film’s most celebrated scene, which somehow manages to fold dodgem cars and rock ‘n’ roll into his austere, spiritual universe.

The dodgems aren’t included as a piece of deliberately jarring modernity. They’re consistent with Bresson’s usual narrative approach, which is to turn his stories into a kind of Stations of the Cross where the importance of every scene is symbolic first, narrative second. In the dodgems’ case, the symbolism helps us understand what the titular character gets out of this kind of escapism; for once, she is in a place where she doesn’t feel the blows the world rains on her. Mouchette is a tragic story, but the emotional power doesn’t come from the kind of overheated actorly breakdowns that Bresson always hated. It comes from investing its scenes with a monumental, metaphorical power. Even when the metaphors are sometimes slightly obvious – and it must be said the opening scene of a bird in a hunter’s trap isn’t Bresson’s subtlest idea – the solemn, contemplative pace and mood of his film-making pushes them beyond cliche.

Criterion’s extras are less numerous than usual but are chosen with real precision and insight. There’s a trailer cut by that other great French critic-turned-film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard. (He did it anonymously, but devotees of JLG will find it awash with Godardisms) There’s an on-set report from a TV show – imagine a modern British arts show doing an on-set report for a new film by, say, Ben Rivers or Andrew Kötting! – and a fine commentary by Tony Rayns. The most fascinating and rewarding extra is the half-hour documentary by future New German Cinema figure Theodor Kotulla, titled Au Hasard Bresson after the film Bresson made immediately before Mouchette, Au Hasard Balthasar.

Au Hasard Bresson brings us back to the matter of Bresson’s skill at self-analysis. It should be pointed out that he’s not didactic even when talking about his own process; at one point he begins a sentence with “In my opinion, which you don’t have to share…” which is not a sentence fragment Godard has ever uttered. Still, the documentary is endlessly illuminating about the craft and intent of Mouchette. Bresson explains that he gives his non-professional cast leeway to improvise but rigorously works out the structure and meaning of each scene beforehand, describing the desired effect as “unlimited surprises within a limited context”. He says he liked Bernanos’s novel because it focused solely on the actions of a character within a stressful situation, rather than trading in “psychology in literary form”. Mouchette is, perhaps, readable as a work of nineteenth-century naturalism rather than cinematic realism, a throwback to the way that pre-Freudian writers like Zola or Balzac focused on a character’s environment above their inner life.

Except that, again, makes it sound old-fashioned, and Mouchette is very alert to the ways that modernity intrudes even in its rural setting. I love the shot of her father half-asleep, drunk, thoughtlessly miming driving a car with his hat as the steering wheel: a tragicomic image of a man reduced to a job. Unlike the one-dimensionally despairing works of many modern social realists, Bresson also has a vision of something greater, and it’s not just the dodgems. Godard’s trailer describes the film as “Christian and sadistic”, but Bresson’s own faith appears serious but far from punitive. He speaks in Kotulla’s film of playing Monteverdi’s ‘Magnificat’ over the hunting scenes in order to produce “an extraordinary transformation of the wild animals”, bringing him unexpectedly in line theologically – if not cinematically – with the swooning, nature-driven transcendentalist Christianity of this month’s Criterion stablemate Terrence Malick. Of whom, more later.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of Mouchette

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