Robert Bresson by Pipolo Tony;

Author:Pipolo, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2010-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Young Virgins of the Provinces II

Mouchette

With Mouchette (1967), Bresson’s second adaptation of a work by Georges Bernanos, the balance between the bleak depiction of the world and the faith by which some characters transcend it becomes increasingly tenuous. Earlier protagonists might be said to unconsciously bring about their deaths prematurely by the way they live. The priest in Diary of a Country Priest accelerates his death through fasting and the consumption of bad alcohol. Mouchette, however, whose life holds not a glimmer of hope and who takes no comfort in faith, is the first of Bresson’s protagonists to commit suicide. The film might be entitled La misérable.

Made immediately after Au hasard Balthazar, Mouchette has strong links to that film. Both are set in the provinces and focus on female protagonists who lose their virginity by force and are overcome by shame. But whereas Marie’s family can be described as working class, Mouchette lives an impoverished existence in every sense, making her situation much gloomier. At home she sleeps and dresses, along with her father and brother, in the same room where her mother lies dying and a baby wails. The false pride of Marie’s father is completely foreign to Mouchette’s, who transports bootleg liquor and often arrives home drunk.

Compared with any previous Bresson protagonist, Mouchette lacks every essential for mobilizing the narrative. She has neither Anne-Marie’s fervor nor Hélène’s insidious determination. She utterly lacks the spiritual strength of the country priest and resembles neither the infectiously courageous Fontaine nor the warrior saint Joan. Her fleeting signs of rebelliousness pale next to Michel’s; Marie manifests more spunk and willfulness. In short, whereas the usual thrust of Bresson’s work springs from the charged tension between a character’s inherent drive and the film’s design, Mouchette’s design, as the opening and closing scenes in the woods demonstrate, has no countering force.

In a sense Mouchette’s precursor is Balthazar, for whom life is also a series of mistreatments that must be borne and whose complaints barely register on anyone. The imagery that pervades the film and the novella, in which she is described as “half-animal,” suggests as much. Like the birds and rabbits hunted and ensnared in the woods on the edge of the village, Mouchette is prey to the cruelty of the townspeople, and like Balthazar is subject to the use and abuse of nearly everyone she encounters. As Balthazar ambles from one owner to another, Mouchette walks through her village, circumscribing its physical and moral smallness. In her ill-fitting clogs, the noise she makes on roads and wooden floors—“like a pair of castanets,” says Bernanos—announces her presence along with her poverty, inviting the disdain that her very name, “Little Fly,” provokes. Her walk describes the crisscrossing of paths, typical of a provincial village, at once au hasard and unavoidable—casual passings that prove to be anything but.

Yet Mouchette is not quite as passive as Balthazar, and her characterization is no more sentimental than it is in Bernanos, although one can easily imagine how mawkish it could have been in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.