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Beautiful, moving film.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Mouchette is a young girl living in an indeterminate village in France. Her mother is dying, her younger sibling needs constant care and her father is an abusive drunk. Her life consists of going to school, where she will never fit in because of her one piece of clothing and taciturn behaviour, and then going home through the fields next to the school.Mouchette's expressions tell all you need to know. She speaks perhaps a dozen words throughout the film but you feel her joy as she is allowed to play bumper cars at the carnival, to her frustration after her father refuses her any more amusement, to her fear and agony as she falls victim to a man she thought she could trust. In an environment where the church and patriarchy hang above any woman's head, this is not an easy life by far.The film reaches its zenith when Mouchette has to hide from a heavy rainstorm on the way back home. She loses one of her galoshes and a poacher named Arsène (who splendidly recreates an epileptic seizure), takes her to his cabin to warm her and speak to her about his fight with the gamekeeper. The price for his help is enormous and breaks the young girl beyond repair. She tries to speak to her mother about it, but mother is dying. Her father and brother mistrust her. When her mother dies, finally the neighborhood shows a little compassion, but this turns to judgment and even a gift of new clothing cannot reconcile her to her peers.The final scene is epochal, with Mouchette rolling around in the grass (apparently pleasurably) before we see she is trying to reach a certain area, to tragic results.Mouchette is suffering, isolation and a small dash of hope, and a must see film.

Currently on IMDb, "Mouchette" has an overall rating of 7.8 and some incredibly glowing reviews. It's also from the fancy-shmancy Criterion Collection--so I expected much, much more than I saw. While many loved it, I sure thought the film was very dull and could have been much better.The film is about a young girl, Mouchette. She appears to be about 12 or perhaps 13 and her life stinks. She doesn't fit in at school and her home life is awful. Her father seems abusive and her mother is dying. To top all this off, later she gets raped. And, to wrap up all this joy, Mouchette rolls into the creeks and drowns herself. Wow...talk about an upbeat film! I noticed that some praised the film for its use of realism--with non-actors and natural surroundings. This didn't really impress me, as the Italians had been making such films for some time--and most of them were much, much more engaging. I would strongly suggest you see "Umberto D" or "The Children Are Watching Us" to see that you can make a sad story with non-actors and STILL have a film that worth seeing and has much more point to it. Sorry. I just didn't enjoy "Mouchette" nor did I see why it is a great film. It was a bit vague and confusing at the beginning and ultimately made me feel miserable and unfulfilled.

"An actor, even a talented actor, gives us too simple an image of a human being, and therefore a false image." – Robert Bresson"Suffering exists only to the extent that God is not omnipotent." - Raimon PannikarRobert Bresson directed "Au hazard Balthazar" and "Mouchette" in 1966, both films about characters who lead lives of incredible challenge and hardship. "Au Hazard Balthazar", which literally means "by chance Balthazar", revolves around a lowly donkey called Balthazar who suffers neglect, random cruelty and much toil as he is passed from one owner to another. Here, the donkey embodies a Christian submissiveness, whilst the various characters he encounters represent different sins (greedy owners, violent drunkards, proud fathers etc), which they perpetrate against both Balthazar and other humans, and themselves receive. The film is swathed in Christian symbolism. Bresson turns the downtrodden donkey into a saintly figure, doomed to live in a world of sin and strife before dying amongst Christ's flock (of sheep). The name "Balthazar" is itself a reference to one of the Bible's three wise men, and the donkey is himself baptised by characters called Joseph and Mary. Many read the film as a Christian tract, the donkey either penitent or devoutly accepting a kind of Christian suffering, but Bresson practised Jansenism, a heretical offshoot of Christianity which denies hard free-will and believes god's grace to be constant rather than earned. In other words, there is no goal to the donkey's suffering, he is not some seraphic Christian in mule form, or even a grim "Christ figure" who "takes humanity's sins". Rather, he simply embodies a state of victim-hood which all the characters share, as well as a kind of morbid corporeality, as he passes anonymously from youth, to middle age to death. Whether there is anything divine or transcendent about the donkey's death is left entirely up to the viewer. Bresson's "Mouchette", released the same year as "Balthazar", follows a similar plot structure. Here we observe as a little girl called Mouchette is bullied and mistreated by a cluster of characters, before rolling down a hill and seemingly drowning herself. Like "Balthazar", the film is built around a series of abuses and shifting power relationships, all of which are reinforced by shots of hunters, poachers and caged and freed birds (the name "Mouchette" itself means "little fly"). Unlike Balthazar, however, Mouchette is capable of dishing out as much violence as she receives, Bresson showing how abuse hurtled towards her is internalised and redirected back at others. Bresson seems more concerned, however, with playing games with how we perceive or misperceive Mouchette. Mouchette is an object of derision among her peers, schoolmates, family members and adults, her entire town treating her with scorn (and labelling her a whore) simply because she is poor. But Bresson reveals Mouchette to be a rather dignified, clean, well dressed, competent and talented girl, and anything "bad" she does (attacking girls with mud in an attempt to sully others as they believe her to be sullied, sleeping with men in an attempt to defiantly be the whore they think she is etc) is merely a response to the stereotyping directed toward her. Mouchette's town, in other words, builds and reinforces Mouchette's negative behaviour. And Bresson's film is filled with scenes which stress Mouchette's grace (her simultaneous readying of four cups of coffee for her family and herself, her caring for her baby sister and dying mother etc), and those which stress the pleasure Mouchette derives from lashing out against her victim-hood (the near sadistic joy she gets from ramming people with bumper cars, the joy she gets from sullying people with mud, the way she appreciates seemingly being raped and rebels against condescending acts of charity etc). The end result is not only a film which highlights the way negative behaviour is reinforced by external treatment - a muddying of Christ's Golden Rule: "others do onto you as you do onto them" – but one which condemns man for being blind to the divine. If we see the divine within everyone, in other words, we treat people differently. Like many of Bresson's films, "Mouchette" ends with its hero's death. Whether this is uplifting, emancipatory, a grim respite, or indeed even an actual death/suicide, is left entirely up to the viewer. In terms of flaws, both films are extremely sentimental and at times contrived (they rely on the cheap emotional tactics of, say, "Elephant Man" and "Schindler's List", wide-eyed sock puppets abused solely to illicit tears). Bresson has a reputation as a cold, detached film-maker, but here he comes across as a glacial Norman Rockwell, his sad eyed donkey seemingly belonging in a heart-strings tugging Walt Disney movie, specifically "Dumbo" and "Pinocchio", two teary eyed "abuse films" released by Disney a decade earlier. It would not be until "The Devil, Probably" that Bresson, possibly inspired by Godard, grafts his existential musings onto any kind of larger social context.8/10 – "Mouchette" is the better of both films, but neither holds the power it once did. Incidentally, "Au Hasard Balthazar" was extremely well received in France when it was released, directors like Godard and Louis Malle driven to tears by Bresson's braying mule. "Mouchette" was equally well received, and was a favourite of Tarkovsky, but seems to have now fallen into obscurity, supplanted in the West by the more crowd pleasing "abuse movies" of Truffaut. Worth two viewings.

Sixteen years after having successfully exploited Georges Bernanos' universe for his "Journal d'Un Curé De Campagne" (1951), Robert Bresson appropriates once again another book by the French writer: "Mouchette" for a very personal, stylish rendering and a canonical film about stolen childhood. The filmmaker always supported that he'd prefer a film to be felt rather than to be understood. Needless to say we leave the projection with a big emotion inside us and we also feel helpless about Mouchette' terrible life. According to Bresson, Mouchette's tragic fate enabled him to put forward "misery, cruelty. They're everywhere: wars, tortures, murders".The film starts with Arsène's and the gamekeeper's eyes staring at quails and partridges that desperately try to free themselves from snares. This harrowing introduction sequence sets the scene for what follows after wards. How not to think of a metaphor for Mouchette's life that offers her no horizon and no hope? This teenage girl is all alone and in spite of her young age, she has to take care of her sick mother, her alcoholic father and her baby brother. She goes to school but feels rejected by her female fellow students, notably when school's over, they stone her. It's the same thing every day and Mouchette is trapped in her loneliness. That's why the sequence at the fair comes as a sort of relief for her. The scene at the bumper cars provides her momentary solace and joy. Then, the key sequence with Arsène will make her open her eyes about what she really wants. In spite of her poverty and solitude, Mouchette needs to love but where to find it in a hostile world?Mouchette strongly belongs to the Bressonian world. She's an outcast and she can't integrate herself to her surrounding. Once again, Bresson underscores the opposition between a pure, subjective person and an objective, hostile world in a sparse, minimal directing with a supremacy granted to images and sounds and the evident symbols they convey. An eloquent example would be when the little girl is all alone in the country and can hear the sound of guns and can see rabbits running or dying. She hasn't got a friend or even one member of her family to talk to. When she wants to tell her mother what Arsène did to her, she dies. Fate dogs her. There's no room for the weak and there's one last exit left... Bresson's austere, intensely visual making fits the story and its themes like a glove and if you don't feel anything during the last sequence, you have a heart of stone.