Mouchette

Robert Bresson's Mouchette won the OCIC Award (the International Catholic Organisation for Cinema award) at Cannes 1967. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022. Adapted from Georges Bernanos's 1937 novel Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette — the film completes Bresson's loose Bernanos diptych alongside Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Bresson's casting of the non-professional Nadine Nortier in the central role was made on the strength of her face during a single audition.

Mouchette (Nortier) is a tiny, ferocious 14-year-old girl in a small French village in the Provençal countryside — her mother dying of consumption, her father drunk and absent, her village neighbours cruel, her schoolmates more so. The film follows a sequence of small humiliations across what is broadly several days of her life: a school-yard incident, a rainstorm in the woods, an interaction with a poacher (Jean-Claude Guilbert), her mother's continuing decline. Marie Cardinal plays the dying mother in a non-credited role.

Bresson's commitment to non-professional actors performing without expressivity, the camera attending to small actions rather than emotional close-ups, and the absolute restraint of conventional dramatic emphasis produced one of the most uncompromising works in his entire filmography. Ghislain Cloquet's photography of the rural French Provence countryside, and Bresson's structural use of silence and brief Monteverdi insertions, anchor a film that has been continuously cited by working filmmakers — Andrei Tarkovsky, the Dardennes brothers, Aki Kaurismäki — as foundational.