MOUCHETTE (1967)

A character begins a film in abject poverty, picked on by just about everyone and resentful in return. What are your standard movie options? She could somehow overcome her background and upbringing and earn a respectable place in the world, and even someone's love. Or she could take her pain out on society by becoming a killer or some other sort of criminal. Or you could be the title character of Robert Bresson's movie, which has a heavier agenda. Adapting a novel by Georges Bernanos, Bresson produced a forbidding film, denying his protagonist either redemption or transgressive catharsis. He does just enough, suggesting just enough possibility for escape, to make the outcome especially tragic. Mouchette is a lament for wasted potential, but it doesn't take its victim off the hook. Because you can't see her entirely as a victim, the consequences are all the more terrible.

The movie opens with the suggestion that things could have gone better. We first see a woman we'll recognize later as Mouchette's mother contemplating an apparent diagnosis of breast cancer and pondering what'll become of her family without her. She's still hanging on as Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) enters her teens as the family slavey and the awkward kid in school. The father treats her like dirt, and the girl seems to have an affinity for dirt. Her after-school hobby is to lurk across the road as the other girls come out so she can throw mud at them. Later, we see consciously track mud into a church. Later still, she'll deliberately grind her muddy soles into an old woman's carpet as the lady tries to be kind to her. She seethes with resentment; all she'd need would be a deformity to turn into the sort of embittered master criminal Lon Chaney Sr. specialized in, the kind dedicated to vengeance against the world for their misfortunes. But we have no sense of Mouchette's imagination, or any inkling that she has an inner life at all.



A day at the fair, after her shift as a part-time bartender, hints at a better life. Through an act of grace, Mouchette is given a ticket for the bumper cars. You see her gain confidence as she learns to steer and take the initiative. When one boy bumps into her repeatedly, she starts bumping back in what looks increasingly like a form of flirting. For a moment she seems like an ordinary teenager. The scene can certainly be interpreted symbolically, with the bumper cars as some sort of metaphor for life, but by Bresson's austere standard it's also an exhilirating bit of filmmaking. And for Mouchette it's downhill from there, starting almost instantly when her father steps in as she tries to continue flirting, slaps her face and shoves her away from the boy.



Mouchette's adventures, such as they've been, have been intercut with a subplot dealing with two hunters' rivalry over a bar girl. The storylines connect when she spends a rainy night in the woods and encounters one of the hunters, Arsene, who has just gotten into a fight with his rival. After Arsene leaves her in a rustic shelter, she hears gunshots. Arsene returns, fearful that he's killed the rival, and asks Mouchette to help him sustain an alibi. Taking her to his home, Arsene suddenly has an epileptic fit. A look of happiness flickers across her face as she tries to comfort him, reminding us that her moribund mother is probably the only person she actually loves. Arsene seems a changed man when he revives. When Mouchette tells him that she'd rather die than betray him, he takes that as a green light to rape her.



The next day, Mouchette learns that the rival hunter had not died -- is actually alive and quite well -- but her own mother finally expires. People's sympathy for her is undercut by their revulsion as they intuit what happened to her the night before. She seems to resent every charitable gesture -- the old woman whose carpet she soils had just given her a shroud for her mother. Finally, feeling rebuffed at every turn, but not really desiring comfort either, Mouchette claims the shroud for herself. She wraps herself in it and rolls herself down a hill. Seemingly disappointed at coming through unhurt, she does it again, this time stopping just short of the water's edge. Still unsatisfied, she keeps on trying....



Bresson is often described as a spiritual filmmaker, while novelist Bernanos was a devout Catholic. Their design was apparently to show us the making of a lost soul, if not to daunt us with how early a soul could be lost. Mouchette starts the film close to the brink as a miserable, resentful creature, and circumstances seem to leave her no way out of a miserable existence.  But if her wretched family and rural society are to blame for bringing her to the precipice, what happens at the precipice is all her own responsibility. Whether she's consciously trying to kill herself or simply indulging in a reckless thrill with indifference to her own survival, you get the sense from the film that she's being sent a message but refuses to listen. One way or the other, she is choosing death. It may be the only form of rebellion she's capable of, but it's one of the bleakest finales in cinema. Mouchette is often compared with Bresson's previous film, Au Hasard Balthasar, in which an oft-mistreated donkey serves as a model of Christian endurance and resignation. Is Mouchette damned by comparison? It largely depends on your worldview, but a secular humanist could still say the girl is wrong to court death. The subject is uncomfortable to think about because we're used to the improbable escape, the lucky break, or the violent catharsis inflicted on others. Bresson's claim to greatness, whether you accept it here or not, is to refuse us those options. As a craftsman, his greatness here consists of the clarity of the narrative and the wonders he works with the amateur adolescent actress Nortier in her one and only film appearance. She can be a sullen mask or unguardedly natural or exactly as expressive as the director requires. She wins your sympathy or at least keeps your interest riveted. You could argue that the film wouldn't be a classic without her, but her casting really only confirms Bresson's casting instincts and his wisdom, in this case, in avoiding established film personalities. He made Mouchette one of the feel-bad movies of all time, and whether you end up liking the film in any sense or not, you've got to respect that kind of achievement.

PICKPOCKET (1959)

Bruce Li one day, Robert Bresson the next: that's the wild world of cinema for you. Bresson may seem to many cineastes like the furthest person from genre cinema, but at a certain point style and genre converge to the point that Bresson was his own genre by virtue of having his own idiosyncratic style and a distinctive point of view that he applied to all his subjects. This is the fourth of his films that I've seen. I saw Lancelot du Lac in college and found Bresson's style off-putting and pretentious. Years later I got Au hasard Balthazar, the one about the donkey, out of the library and was more favorably impressed with the conceptual rigor of his approach. I've also seen his farewell film, L'Argent, which I enjoyed as a grim piece of work that came complete with a car chase and an axe murder. In the extras for that DVD Bresson expounded his ideas of "cinematic writing" in a way that suggested that he was, in his own fashion, an action director. They also showed a playful attitude I warmed to, as when he told a 1983 interviewer that the film then playing in theaters that best exemplified his cinematic principles was Octopussy.

In any event, Pickpocket is a French crime film and therefore of inherent interest to me. Bresson warns the audience immediately that his film isn't made in the style of a policier, but he can't change the fact that it's a French film about crime. His disclaimer is still a fair one, since he's not really concerned with the milieu of crime as much as with the mental or spiritual condition of a particular criminal. Unfortunately, Bresson's concern on this occasion isn't especially original, since it'll soon be apparent to well-read people that this film is a variation on the theme from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Fortunately, Dostoevsky's story is a good one and adaptable to other settings.

Michel is an aspiring pickpocket who does crimes in part to provide money for his sick mother. As was typical of him, Bresson cast the part with a first-time actor, Martin La Salle, who subsequently moved to Mexico and became a full-time actor with films like Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon and Alucarda on his resume. Michel is a small-time Raskolnikov who argues in a cafe that society's geniuses ought to be able to steal and break other laws to provide for themselves and thus benefit society in the long run. He's not a good pickpocket initially, but is a fairly lucky one, escaping one arrest for lack of evidence. He's determined to become better at the trade and ultimately falls in with a very professional team that wreaks havoc in train stations.

Pickpocketing is an ideal subject for Bresson's unconventional style, which tends to steer away from the human face and toward portraying bodies and objects in motion. What bugged me about Lancelot was his habit of focusing on the knights' feet when they were walking, for instance. Here, however, it's the sensible thing to focus on hands reaching into coat pockets and pocketbooks or passing swag to other sets of hands. The scenes of the gang at work in the train station are brilliantly shot and choreographed. The film is also well edited to build the momentum of the gang's crime spree and the tension of Michel's various risky solo jobs.

Dostoevsky kicks in again as Michel falls for Jeanne (Marika Green, aunt of Eva), a downstairs neighbor of his mother, and guilts over not being with his dying mom enough in her last days and failing to live up to his promises to her. He finds that it wasn't enough to salve his conscience to give her money, and he also finds that when his own conscience falls short, the idea of what people he cares for think of him is nearly an adequate substitute. From Crime and Punishment Bresson also appropriates the idea of a patient policeman engaged in subtle psychological warfare with his prey. As I suggested, it's initially annoying to discover that Bresson copies the Russian so closely, but he's talented enough, as are, for his purposes, his cast of inexperienced actors, that the story asserts its own individuality while following the Dostoevsky pattern.

Bresson is often hyped for his spirituality, which is clearly present in films like Balthazar and Diary of a Country Priest. Watch the Criterion DVD that I got out of the Albany Public Library (a recent acquisition) and you'll hear Paul Schrader get a little nutty on the subject. He's taken a stopwatch to Pickpocket, it seems, in order to explain that Bresson cuts between shots with unorthodox timing in order to jar viewers into a state of unease that will presumably make them receptive to the incoming spiritual message. That's overstating things a bit. Pickpocket flows more smoothly than Schrader's intro might suggest (and why call it an introduction and then warn viewers of spoilers so they don't watch it until after they've seen the film, anyway?), and on this occasion the spirituality is basically Dostoevsky's, not Bresson's. The main thing is that it's a simple, accessible story intelligently cinematized in a way that non-specialist audiences should appreciate as much as connoisseurs. I still have a lot of Bresson to see (the Library has Diary as well as A Man Escaped), but I feel confident in recommending Pickpocket to people who want to try him out for the first time.

Here's the French trailer. The narrator is mostly speculating about the motives and mindset of the title character. Judge for yourself.