Mouchette

Screening on Film

Directed by Robert Bresson.
With Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Maria Cardinal.
France, 1967, 35mm, black & white, 80 min.
French with English subtitles.

A spiritual meditation on isolation and suffering, Mouchette is a visual study whose tragic eponymous heroine achieves a Bressonian grace. A major filmmaker whose idiosyncratic style has been described as creating a cinematic language unto itself, Bresson treats the incidents of fourteen year old Mouchette’s everyday existence with his customary precision and restraint. Loved by both Ingmar Bergman and Jim Jarmusch (who placed it in his top ten films of all time), the film is a moving portrait containing a fairground sequence of pure, exuberant joy unlike anything else in Bresson’s oeuvre.