The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 9-15
Mouchette (1967)
Directed by Robert Bresson
Bresson’s last black-and-white film was his second adaptation of a Georges Bernanos novel. When asked in an interview what he thought of Bernanos, Bresson kept his distance—saying that Bernanos had the attitude of a soldier, and he himself did not—but also praised the writer, ascribing to his fellow Frenchman’s work an element of the sublime. Bresson’s own incarnation of Mouchette—a poor, ridiculed fourteen-year-old, whose neighbors in a small French town alternate between abusing and ignoring her—has some of her first creator’s pugnacity and urge for transcendence. Treated mostly with contempt, she is contemptuous in return. She throws dirt at her classmates, refuses to sing during lessons, stomps through mud and wipes her embarrassingly oversized clogs on a clean carpet. Effectively barred from participating in the town’s social life, she wants to leave a mark. After a particularly disastrous night—a rape and a death, neither of which interrupt the constancy of demands made upon the girl—Mouchette opts to roll herself into a lake. We first hear the splash, and then see the water’s surface, untroubled. Mouchette has disappeared, dissolved. But it is unlikely that Bresson means to mock her earlier efforts. “She’s waiting for a revelation,” he suggested, and this exit—Mouchette leaves a dress caught in the lakeside grass, like a grave marker—can read as a final act of courage, a step in search of revelation that couldn’t be had in life. But it is also a final and desperate gesture: like the film itself, inarguably simple and totally oblique. Elina Mishuris (November 15, 7:15pm, 9:15pm at BAM’s “Bresson on Cinema”)