Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson) (Patreon)

37/100

Second viewing, last seen at MoMA in 1999. Longtime readers familiar with Bresson's study in sullen disconsolation will be unsurprised by my bizarrely low rating, rolling their eyes in there-he-goes-again incredulity. Everyone else: Just chalk it up to the same personal quirk that makes me largely indifferent to canonical masterpieces ranging from Sansho the Bailiff to Moonlight. "Solicits pity for agency-deprived victims; does little else" is the very first entry on a list I once created of my recurring (to the point of tedium, even for myself) criticisms*—if the movie merely seeks to demonstrate that life can be cruel, and does so by relentlessly pounding some poor innocent into the dirt, I will eventually protect myself by emotionally disengaging. (Rare exceptions to this rule, e.g. Dogville and A Gentle Creature, are invariably abstract and/or surreal. It's naturalistic sadism that I can't hack.) Mouchette does complicate this by making its title character somewhat unsympathetic, prone to throwing dirt clods at classmates (though that seems like retaliation for their mockery) and engaging in a proto-Breillat tryst with Arsène the poacher (which, like Fat Girl, requires accepting the idea that a young woman can embrace her rapist during the act, something with which I have enormous difficulty; see also Straw Dogs). By and large, though, this is just 81 solid minutes of H.I. McDunnough intoning "He was especially hard on the little things, the helpless and the gentle creatures" as a cute bunny rabbit gets blown up by a wantonly tossed grenade. Mouchette's shoes don't fit. She stares blankly ahead while her classmates sing (I kid you not) "Hope, hope is dead," then gets physically abused by the teacher for not taking part. A boy flashes his dick at her, unmistakably as a hostile gesture. Her father literally shoves her into the basin of holy water at their church. That's just the first few minutes, long before she gets sexually assaulted and potentially made an accessory-after-the-fact to murder. This girl's existence is so miserable that she cries in her sleep. Even her one fleeting moment of happiness—flirting with a boy as they both ride bumper cars—involves her getting repeatedly slammed into (though actually that's kind of a nice touch). Yes, it's a hard world for little things, but I know that; either make it comically absurd (as in Raising Arizona) or starkly mythic (as in The Night of the Hunter). Mouchette actually begins in the latter mode—first thing we see, devoid of any context, is Mouchette's dying mother, who asks aloud "What will become of them without me?"; might be my favorite opening 30 seconds of a film I dislike—but quickly shifts into flat, dour observation of arbitrary punishment. Not for me.

(Also, you cannot drown yourself by just rolling into a stream. Though we don't see her body, so maybe it's meant to be more mystical than that. Anyone else ever notice that the final shot's on a loop, by the way? Not sure why, since it's not as if we see Mouchette hit the water or anything; can't be a means of extending the moment before Nadine Nortier resurfaces to breathe. Weird.)

* For those who haven't previously seen that (deliberately snide) checklist: