Perhaps the tidings are too glad this holiday season. Remedy that with Mouchette. The title character lives with her booze-addicted father and wasting, bedridden mother in a remote French village. She changes her infant brother’s diapers and attends to her thankless parents. The baby cries; the mother dies; rabbits are shot by hunters. Mouchette rolls down a hill, into the river, and is seen no more. Director Robert Bresson spoke on the ubiquity of his heroine: She “offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.” – Brant Bingamon
