A young girl’s isolation

Press, 17 June 1982, Page 14

A young girl’s isolation

“Mouchette," a film by the French director, Robert Bresson, about a girl’s isolation and desperation, is next week's selection by the Canterbury Film Society. She is a 14-year-old schoolgirl, her father, an alcoholic bootlegger, her mother bedridden and dying. Mouchette is also shunned by her school friends and hostile to them; later, , she also becomes involved with a game keeper and a poacher, ending in one of their deaths.

After further '' complications and. deprivation, Mouchette commits suicide, rolling herself three times down a. hill until she falls in the pond below. According to “Sight and Sound,”- “Mouchette” is a masterpiece: a Bresson film pure and’ simple with its extraordinary correspondences between sound and gesture to evoke the unspoken and unseen. J For instance, no one but Bresson could • ; have

conceived the extraordinary dialogue between hands, veiled eyes and inanimate objects which pinpoints the relationship between the poacher, the gamekeeper and the barmaid. Louisa. The society’s weekly screenings are held at University Room Al, Ham, at 8 p.m., Tuesdays, and at the Museum Theatre at 7.30 p.m.. Wednesdays. The half-yearly subscription now is sl’2. and $lO for students and senior citizens. ..