Mouchette

Mouchette (2006 DVD)

Directed by Robert Bresson

France, 1967

In French with English subtitles

I liked this, but I wasn't blown away by it. While Nadine Nortier's Mouchette is one of the most fascinating teen characters I've seen in a while, her performance is so riveting that some of the other aspects of the film paled in comparison for me. I won't go into all the details in case there's anyone else out there who still hasn't seen the movie as yet, but Mouchette is a flat-out pobrecita of a 14-year old stuck in a provincial French backwater and surrounded by familial indifference, violence, and death at every turn. Bresson and Nortier do a masterful job at making you empathize with Mouchette's suffering as a poverty-stricken misfit, and there are individual scenes involving holy water in a church, bumper cars at a village fair, and adults pretending to console Mouchette only as a pretext to pass judgement on her that are visually and emotionally arresting. Yet for all its stylized "reality," the ending just didn't do it for me--feeling more like a narrative cop-out than the logical conclusion to what had come before. A nice intro to Bresson but at least one friend has already assured me that I'll probably end up liking Pickpocket more. (http://www.criterion.com/)