The Cinematheque

“Achieves an intense purity of a kind that few directors essay, let alone achieve … The result is an extraordinarily spiritual meditation.”

Tony Rayns, Time Out

A work of extraordinary purity and grace, the almost unbearably moving Mouchette was Bresson’s second adaptation of a Georges Bernanos novel—Diary of a Country Priest was the first—and it serves as something of a companion piece to Au hasard Balthazar in its somber but ultimately profound account of earthly suffering. The film chronicles the final 24 hours in the life of 14-year-old Mouchette (Nadine Nortier), a lonely, unloved, and mistreated peasant girl living in Provence with her alcoholic father and dying mother. Bresson charts Mouchette’s torments with a relentlessness that some have found oppressive, even sadistic; others have praised the film for its serious, unsentimental treatments of innocence and childhood. The soundtrack makes sublime use of Monteverdi’s Magnificat, while its tour-de-force denouement ranks among cinema’s most affecting. We side with Ingmar Bergman: ​“Oh, Mouchette. I loved it, I loved it!”

In French with English subtitles

One of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time
Tsai Ming-liang, Cristi Puiu, Sight and Sound 2022 poll

“A visionary, poetic film, fraught with elusive, unsettling meanings: a classic cinematic text.”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian