(1967) As eyes watch from the bushes, a hand sets up a simple trap that will strangle a bird. But as another bird is ensnared, another set of hands comes and frees them. Fourteen-year-old Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) doesn’t say much — she won’t even sing in school, though she does throw clods of dirt at classmates — as she cares for her ailing mother and baby brother, and as her father nightly trucks in smuggled booze to the local bar. But she watches as the gamekeeper and the poacher battle both professionally and personally — they’re both sweet on the local barmaid — even as the gamekeeper’s wife can’t be bothered with a reaction, a reaction that doesn’t even seem expected. Not an idyllic existence, but then things can get worse. Adapted from a novel by Georges Bernanos, original author of Bresson’s signature work Diary of a Country Priest, this is both a sympathetic and a brutally unsentimental portrait, with, in the bumper cars sequence at the fair, the one moment of pure exuberance and delight in all of Bresson’s work (curiously, it is his one addition to the novel). Tied with Buñuel’s Belle de Jour in a critics’ poll as the best French film of its year, Mouchette was this year named one of the 100 All-Time Best Movies by Time magazine. “Achieves an intense purity of a kind that few directors essay, let alone achieve. The simplicity is radical, not facile, and the result is an extraordinary spiritual meditation.” – Tony Rayns, Time Out (London). “A faultless film...a fusion of realism and allegorical fable. Mouchette’s isolation and intensity of her suffering is conveyed not only in the images but through Bresson’s brilliantly orchestrated soundtrack.” – Peter Morris, Sadoul’s Dictionary of Films. “One of the purest Bressons. Its effect as you watch it is beautifully unforgiving; as you recall it, brutally radiant.” – Richard Corliss, Time (2005).

A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE
1:00, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20, 10:10

• Robert Bresson’s PICKPOCKET
• Listen to Paul Schrader talking about Bresson on ‘The Leonard Lopate Show’
• Ingmar Bergman on Mouchette
• Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette
• Jim Jarmusch’s Top 10 films of all time

Available at Amazon: ROBERT BRESSON edited by James Quandt