Mouchette (DVD)

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In Harlan Ellison´s short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," an all-powerful computer known as AM rules over the lives of the only five surviving humans. AM inflicts random tortures on them, toying with its victims in a cruel game whose rules change at the computer´s whim. AM holds the cards, and there is no way out. Ted, the story´s protagonist, finds his only possible redemption by killing his companions before AM can react. He is rewarded for his act of mercy with an eternity (literally) of suffering at the hands of AM who turns him into a gelatinous blob, assuring that he can never kill himself.

There is no evil super-computer in Robert Bresson´s 1967 masterpiece "Mouchette," but the rules are stacked just as heavily against the titular protagonist. Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is a teenage peasant girl with a dying mother and an abusive, alcoholic father. With her raggedy hand-me-down clothes and clogs two sizes too big, she finds no friends in school either, nor does she invite them, preferring instead to lob mudballs at her classmates during recess. Whether it´s a desperate cry for help or sheer spite, the saddest part is that the other girls don´t even care enough to retaliate. Mouchette simply means nothing to them. The self-absorbed adults in town likewise have no time for the dirty little poor girl or her troubles.

Mouchette´s days consist of listless days at school and equally listless nights at home, where she is expected to handle all the household chores and take care of the baby, while her no-account father and brother smuggle alcohol, mostly for their own consumption. At least these quotidian rituals provide some minor respite, but Mouchette still aches for an escape or at least a temporary refuge from the tedium.

She finds some relief in her daily walks through the forest, taking the long way home (for understandable reasons) but this "green place" offers her only the modest gift of solitude, not redemption. On one such walk, Mouchette is waylaid by a rainstorm (she calls it a cyclone, but nobody else believes her) which brings her face to face with Arsène (Jean-Claude Guilbert), a local poacher. Arsène believes he has just killed Mathieu (Jean Vimenet) in a drunken argument. Most of the adult interactions in "Mouchette" involve copious amounts of alcohol; it´s a disease that stalks the countryside like the Black Death of 500 years previous. Arsène enlists Mouchette´s aid in providing him an alibi. She readily agrees, but their conversation still turns ugly, and Arsène rapes her. In the morning, Mouchette slinks back home just in time to see her mother die.

That´s a rotten day by any standard, but it provides a form of liberation for Mouchette as well. She has been pushed beyond caring about any social niceties, about anyone´s rules. When the falsely pious townsfolk show her sympathy for her mother´s death, she figuratively spits in her faces, and literally treads mud all over their nice, pretty rugs. But poor Mouchette´s awakening still finds her with the same limited options she had before. She´s a rebel with nothing to rebel against, simply because nobody cares. Like Ted in the Ellison story, the rules just won´t allow Mouchette any way to win in this world, so her only choice is to leave it on her own terms. And so she does.

Ted´s sacrifice was an act of heroism, but Mouchette´s suicide can only be seen as an act of desperation from a girl whose limited imagination afforded her no other choice. In Bresson´s prior films, his characters achieved a state of grace in their suffering, but it´s hard to say the same of Mouchette. Her loss is simply tragic, painful, desperate, with no redeeming aspect. As a big "fuck you" to the town, it will go unheeded due to the prevalent apathy. Even dear old dad will use it as little more than another excuse to get piss-drunk. At best, it can be seen as Mouchette´s defiant act of autonomy, taking control of her body and her life in a way the rotted-besotted town patriarchy would never allow. Cold comfort.