Product Description

Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 01/16/2007

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26826 in DVD
• Brand: IMAGE ENT.
• Released on: 2007-01-16
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Black & White, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 81 minutes

Features

• Robert Bresson plumbs great reservoirs of feeling with Mouchette, one of the most searing portraits of human desperation ever put on film. Faced with a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace in nature and daily routine, a respite from her economic and pubescent turmoil. An essential work of French filmmaking, Bresson's

Amazon.com
Perhaps the most accessible of Robert Bresson's films, this story of a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the mercy of the world around her is like a melodrama stripped of flourish. Mouchette is an angry adolescent in the French provinces, the daughter of a drunken bootlegger and a dying, bedridden mother, a pariah in school and a figure of village gossip. She rebels in typically adolescent ways, lobbing mud at teasing classmates and defying wagging tongues with a willful stare, but her deep pain and loneliness pour from her hollow, sad eyes. There's no sentimentality in Bresson's portrait of village life, but for a few brief moments the film explodes with energy and emotion. Mouchette rides the bumper cars at a local fair, flirting with a young boy in loving bumps and deliberate rams, and her dour expression flowers in a smile as the fairground speakers blare a rock & roll tune... until her father's heavy hand slaps her back to reality. It's a moment unlike any other in a Bresson film, a joyous reprieve from the monotony of her life, but if the rest of her existence is glum and hopeless, the film is unexpectedly beautiful. The style is often fragmented--the film opens on a stunning play of hands, feet, and spying eyes as poacher and police both wait for their prey--but the beauty of the forests and meadows creates an idyllic naturalism that leavens Bresson's harsh portrait of the human condition. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Fragments of a life (without story or plot)
I'm not sure that what is most unique and remarkable about Bresson is his "spiritual style," as it is often described. One might say that by showing life in all its harshness his work opens the viewer to a vision of its "fallen state" and to the way in which a kind of grace is exhibited in the stubborn refusal of his central characters to cave in to the ways of the world even in the face of harsh adversity. (Even here, Mouchette's final seemingly tragic act is shown to be in many ways a joyous one, the work of a child at play, whose counterpart in the film is the exuberant bumper car ride, where she laughs and flirts even as she is jolted and tossled about by the shock of being continuously smashed by other cars). Still, what seems most distinctive about his films is not so much the subject matter as the deliberate lack of pretense in its style, which amounts almost to a kind of refusal to let himself as filmmaker or storytelling conventions intrude on the blunt portrayal of life.

While you can certainly reconstruct the events portrayed in this film in terms of a standard plot structure, Bresson seems unwilling to plot out the story of Mouchette; in an interview contained on this dvd he says to a reporter that if he could sum up what happens to Mouchette it would be absurd to make a movie of it. He aims only to give the essentials, showing no more than what is absolutely necessary, with the implication that as viewers we feel as though the world we are shown piecemeal is much bigger and more complete than what we are permitted to see. It is not so much "Mouchette's story" that we are allowed to see as "Mouchette's world": a small world, with a few recognizable places, and recognizable routines, a few places she is permitted to go by a domineering father, and by a mother and brother whose needs place great but uncoerced demands upon her, and a few places she goes on her own, in acts of deliberate defiance, and at the same time acts of seeking someone who will not judge her or use her or place demands upon her. Because it feels like the world we enter with Bresson's films is not merely a story that is being told (even when, as in this case, it happens to be adapted from a story that had been written down by Georges Bernanos), it is something that endures, something that remains with the viewer (at least this one) long after the final image has faded.

In all of his films, but this one feels unique and special in this respect, Bresson achieves something more than merely fiction. This is not an "enjoyable" filmgoing experience, and his aim is neither to uplift or to provide a message or entertain, but simply to show. This film is entertaining and surprising in its own way, but in the sense that it is an endless source of surprise and wonder when Bresson refuses to employ cliches of any sort and yet manages to make the events he portrays directly intelligible, without any hint of manipulation of audience emotions or expectations. Not to be missed by anyone who is interested in the potentials of film, or in the artistic recreation of life in both its everyday and its tragic dimensions.

A grim, moving and superb film
I'd seen a bunch of Bresson films before I ever heard of Mouchette, and had always regarded him as the director who, while I wouldn't necessarily want to watch his films to the exclusion of anyone else's, speaks to what's best in me; Bresson's work has an uncompromising directness that no other film-maker has ever matched, in my experience. Watching his films, you feel that something is being imparted to you that you needed to know; in this respect, he's utterly unlike the vast majority of directors, who seek merely to provide diversion and laffs. His influence on Scorsese, Fassbinder and Kaurismaki is undeniable, and Paul Schrader has blatantly ripped him off on more than one occasion (though we forgive Schrader because he is himself such a good director).

Mouchette is not the most famous of Bresson's films but it's one of the best I've seen - though admittedly this is misleading, as most of Bresson's films after the late 40s are masterpieces. Mouchette's life is almost unrelentingly awful; her mother is dying, and most of her verbal contact with Mouchette consists of orders to look after the baby and get her some more gin; her father takes whatever money she earns, and her brother never says anything at all. She lives in a grotty village in a totally unattractive-looking part of Provence, where the local boys have nothing better to do than drop their pants in her direction, and where her sole recreation is throwing mud at her schoolmates. Nadine Nortier, one of a string of non-professional actors to be burdened with carrying a Bresson movie, is stunning as the teenaged Mouchette. Few cinematic leading ladies have been so utterly unglamorous. Her hair is straggly and greasy-looking, her clothes are outsized hand-me-downs and her shoes are enormous clogs that clack loudly as she walks, yet Nortier never loses contact with Mouchette's livid anger and spiritual dignity. When professional actresses cry, they tend to crease up their faces and emote; Nortier stares blankly into the middle distance as the tears stream down her face.

Mouchette is an extraordinary film, not one to be watched as part of a night of videos, unless the other videos also happen to be directed by Bresson. It's one of Bresson's most unrelentingly sombre films, but the outcome, although tragic, is not nihilistic (as, arguably, was the director's later study of disaffected youth, "Le Diable probablement"). Not a feelgood movie, but by no means a nothing-means-anything movie, either, which is a considerable achievement by anyone's standards, and by the standards of contemporary movies, an outright miracle.

mouchette, a twelve year old village girl, a great character
Mouchette is without any doubt one of the best films ever made or to be made. In almost sacral serenity it shows us the last three days of the life of a twelve year old very poor village girl. Mouchette survives in the strenght of her character and soul, even when we have to watch her commit suicide. I remember, in the seventies Mrs.Susan Sonntag appriciated this film very much. The story cannot be told by its plot, because it is the most original way of filmmaking Bresson invented, that makes us understand, what happenes to Mouchette. There is nothing comparable to Bressons work, which is deeply transcendental. It has religious impact and surves us with great precision.