Much critical discussion of Robert Bresson — whom Jean-Luc Godard called the Mozart of film — has fixated on whether he was a religious artist or a materialist. But do we have to choose? His Mouchette is notable for being both uncanny and earthy; it's also the turning point between his earlier, more optimistic films and his grim later work.
Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is a teenage girl who struggles with an dying mother (Maria Cardinal) and alcoholic father (Paul Hebert). She lives a joyless existence with few respites. Searching for a way out, she meets up with a poacher Arsene (Jean-Claude Guilbert), who rapes her in a drunken stupor.
In Mouchette, Bresson depicts backwater France — portrayed here as an equivalent to rural Mississippi or Alabama — as a hellhole of alcoholism and male brutishness. The sense of place is just as strong here as in his later depictions of doomed Parisian youth. Based on a Georges Bernanos novel, Mouchette probably wasn't conceived as a social indictment, but it comes across as one all the same — no wonder the Dardenne brothers essentially remade it with a Marxist spin as Rosetta.
Bresson was a gifted enough director of non-actors to get a great performance out of a donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar. In Mouchette, Nortier's blank face suggests a very expressive, haunting emptiness.
While Bresson's often referred to as a minimalist, his soundtracks are always vivid and lively as his images are austere. As with the confrontation between the spirit and flesh in his work, these tensions aren't necessarily contradictory. They come to a head in the final image of Mouchette, one of cinema's most haunting largely due to its use of music.
— Steve Erickson
DVD EXTRAS: This edition includes a trailer cut by Jean-Luc Godard and two short documentaries. "Traveling," an eight-minute excerpt from the TV show Cinema, is pretty disposable, memorable mostly for Guilbert's matter-of-fact statements about the dullness of acting. "Au Hasard Bresson" is more substantial, particularly for juxtaposing Bresson's statements about the purity of cinema and the possibility of transforming images through music with concrete examples of his working methods. British critic Tony Rayns also contributes a commentary.