Mouchette

Robert Bresson's Mouchette won the OCIC Award (the prize of the International Catholic Organisation for Cinema) at Cannes in 1967, and in 2022 it entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll. Adapted from Georges Bernanos's 1937 novel Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, it completes Bresson's loose Bernanos diptych with Diary of a Country Priest (1951). He cast the non-professional Nadine Nortier in the title role on the strength of her face at a single audition.

Mouchette (Nortier) is a tiny, ferocious 14-year-old in a village in the Provençal countryside. Her mother is dying of consumption, her father is drunk and absent, her neighbours are cruel and her schoolmates crueller. The film follows a run of small humiliations over what seems to be a few days of her life: trouble in the schoolyard, a rainstorm in the woods, an encounter with a poacher (Jean-Claude Guilbert), her mother's continuing decline. Marie Cardinal plays the dying mother, uncredited.

Bresson has his non-professionals perform without expression, keeps his camera on small actions in place of emotional close-ups, and refuses conventional dramatic emphasis altogether, and the result is one of the most uncompromising films he ever made. Ghislain Cloquet photographs the Provençal countryside, and Bresson uses silence, and brief passages of Monteverdi, as part of the structure. Andrei Tarkovsky, the Dardenne brothers and Aki Kaurismäki have all named it as foundational, and it is hard to think of a film that grants its heroine less comfort or more dignity.