Ultimi appuntamenti con Bresson e con il suo Mouchette, prima dell’estate. Insieme a Au Hasard Balthazar, la coppia di film si specchia negli occhi del cinefilo con una forza ancora intatta. Ed è per questo che qui in redazione non ci leviamo di dosso il desiderio di parlarne. Visto che abbiamo già dedicato spazio ai materiali classici e anche a quelli rari, siamo andati a zonzo per trovare altri scritti nuovi e meno nuovi, a testimonianza della sopravvivenza di Bresson nel pensiero cinematografico odierno.

Interessante scoprire alcune voci anglofone. Per esempio, sulla rivista di culto “Senses of Cinema”, Bill Mousoulis nel 200 confrontava i due film in questo modo: “Mouchette is like a reworking of some aspects of Balthazar. There is the same (semi) rural setting, the same focus on a teenage girl’s experience, the same cruelty, suffering, destruction. But its overall form is remarkably different: Balthazar is set over many years and composed of short fragments, whereas Mouchette is set over a 24-hour period and is composed of only several lengthy, unified sequences.

In Balthazar, there is a lovely fragment near the end of the film of Marie’s mother lamenting over her recent losses.Mouchette opens with a similar mother’s lament, in one of the cinema’s most stunning opening shots. It’s appropriate that this lament opens the film, for Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is already far advanced in her suffering. Marie undergoes a process of corruption; Mouchette (though younger) is already world-weary and tarnished. It is a shock seeing such an earthy female type in a Bresson film – he usually casts waif or pretty types. Mouchette is caring and resilient, but also sullen and naive. The film perfectly captures her troubled existence. It is somewhat less effective in expressing the momentousness of what happens to her over the stormy night (maybe Bresson’s style is limited in some contexts?), but it is still a painful and moving film, probably Bresson’s most conventional and accessible (along with A Man Escaped).

Both Balthazar and Mouchette are graced by the presence of the very un-Bressonian actor Jean-Claude Guilbert, who plays the characters of Arnold and Arsene respectively. These two characters are drunk and disorderly, but Bresson clearly loves them. It shouldn’t be ignored what Mouchette’s arms do whilst Arsene tries to rape her. And later she calls him her “lover”. Bresson’s regard for the outcast, the injured, is exemplary. Mouchette’s final action is mysterious, but perfect symbolically: there is the world, and there is a soul, and sometimes … Let’s just say that there are dodgem-cars in heaven.

Robert Bresson has claims to being one of the cinema’s true geniuses. An exquisite stylist, he created a cinematic language onto himself. His films are both light and profound, both severe and tender, both bleak and life-affirming.Au Hasard, Balthazar and Mouchette are two masterpieces in a body of work full of great films”.

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Ancora, nel 2013, Mark Cresswell e Zulfia Karimova, sulla rivista “Film-Philosphy” studiavano il concetto di trauma in Mouchette: “Without claiming that we have located the one authentic cinematic representation of trauma, we nevertheless ‘tracked back’ to what we called – following Foucault – a ‘zero-point’ of representation in the work of the French director, Robert Bresson: specifically, his 1967 film, Mouchette (1967). One consequence of Bresson’s mode of representation in Mouchette, we would suggest, is – following Foucault – to problematize the stereotypical representation of the Hollywood-ized form.

(…)The theme of ‘structural force’ then led us back to Simone Weil, whose theory of the objectifying effects (the ‘thingification) of force similarly provided an account of trauma’s causal mechanism which avoided excessive personification whilst preserving critical agency. In this respect Weil’s reflections upon representation (‘misfortune’s image’) and Bresson’s mode of representation are complementary. Moreover, we thought that the ‘structural force’ that surrounded Mouchette’s trauma needed to be understood not just in its extreme forms (as rape and suicide) but in its ‘mundane, reiterative, everyday’ forms, which is to say as a materially recalcitrant poverty and her awareness of her political and cultural powerlessness. For a persuasive account of this latter impact we turned briefly to the work of Beverley Skeggs.

What are the political and cultural consequences of such an intervention? We think they are these: first, it problematizes the ways in which the knowledge of modern psychiatry – the ‘psy-complex’ – as it surrounds ‘trauma’ is imbricated with popular modes of cinematic representation (the Hollywood-ized form) in a way which reproduces and does not subvert stereotypical representations of trauma. This seems to have particular implications for the cinematic representation of women. For they may be simultaneously stereotyped – as vulnerable, selfharming, attractive – yet only permitted access to the subjective experience of trauma”.

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Segnaliamo poi, più in breve, questa bella analisi del cult blog “Film Sufi”, il pezzo del grande J. Hoberman sul “Village Voice”, e per concludere, da leggere assolutamente lo speciale di Cineforum che ha rovistato tra gli archivi del 1967 per ritrovare quel che era stato scritto sui due film.

Una cosa, da qui, la estraiamo, scritta da Michèle Esteve: “Là dove le equivalenze non bastavano o non erano compatibili con un’estetica cinematografica, Bresson ha avuto la cura di suggerire l’indicibile per mezzo dei ‘rapporti di immagine’: «Il campo del cinema è il campo dell’indicibile». L’indicibile in Mouchette è innanzitutto il superamento della psicologia, che il romanziere sottolineava, e che si osserva in particolare nella sequenza dell’epilessia. Al principio del film come al principio del libro, l’adolescente è incapace di cantare bene e rifiuta di seguire la musica. Questo rifiuto, questa indifferenza in Bresson e questo odio in Bernanos si spiegano per diverse cause: disprezzo nei riguardi delle convenzioni sociali, affermazione di una forte instransigenza, rifiuto di un universo che resta agli occhi della ragazza il simbolo di un universo di felicità, di purezza e d’amore giudicato inaccessibile. Se la musica è il simbolo della riconciliazione col mondo esterno, con la vita e con se stessa, Mouchette non può che odiarla, poiché il mondo la umilia, la respinge e poiché essa si sente inconsciamente non conciliata cogli altri e con se stessa. L’indicibile è infine la certezza suggerita da Bresson che Mouchette è salvata a dispetto del suicidio e bisogna riconoscere, a questo proposito, come notava Jean de Baroncelli, che l’ultima sequenza del film è una delle più belle e delle più commoventi che siano mai state realizzate. Come nel romanzo, la morte di Mouchette dà la chiave del film e tutto il film la suggerisce, la prepara, conduce là, come vuole il carattere inesorabile della tragedia. L’apertura e la prima sequenza la facevano presagire. La custode dei morti introduce nella coscienza della fanciulla l’idea della morte:«E tu, Mouchette, hai mai pensato alla morte?».