‘Mouchette’ & ‘The Old Man and the Sea’
Originally published in Cinemania on February 7, 2025.
Objectivity, in relation to art, cannot exist. Art is, in the most basic terms, an expression of an artist, and consequently subjective. However, the conceit of an “objective eye,” still technically a misnomer, can be illustrative of a genre of artist that supposes to present his or her subject(s) without explicit comment. Film and literature are especially conducive to this style because they traditionally describe a string of events. The artist’s method for description informs an audience as much or as little as the artist chooses. In Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette, and in Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea, both men posit an “objective eye” — that is: they choose to inform the audience almost entirely of what occurs and rarely provide ancillary information such as internal thoughts or indications of consumer guidance.
Leave it to disenchanted post-Catholic Jansenist Robert Bresson to adapt a novel about child misery for film and add to it a dying mother for that extra ounce of pessimism. And leave it to French cinema grandmaster Robert Bresson to miraculously make of the despair something that transcends it and ironically feels optimistic — certainly not for Mouchette specifically (spoiler, oops), but for life, for the little and infrequent beauties (for which, here, Bresson’s camera carries much responsibility) amid the unfairly frequent terribleness.
As storied American author and quintessentially Manly Man™ Ernest Hemingway often achieved by paring down his writing to objective observations (most tersely in his Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea), Bresson’s post-Pickpocket (1959) stoniness precludes emotional release and redemption so stringently that our brains search for — and invariably find — it in whichever images touch us most; we apply our ideals (and hopes and experiences) to his subjects and make of them saints (Oh! poor, sweet Balthazar!), their sacrifices an ultimate good, we may tell ourselves, because it can’t be as bad for others (or us) as it was for them, whether the sentiment matches or collides with Bresson’s intent.
In furthering his adherence to objectivity, Bresson famously employed non-actors for his roles in every film after Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) and refused them any performance feedback, preferring instead to shoot as many takes necessary until he was pleased.
Mouchette is Bresson’s most overtly metaphorical film by virtue of what could be considered a miniature prologue in which a gamekeeper (Jean Vimenet) catches and releases partridges in a sequence that ends with Mouchette’s introduction: its proposition is that children are at the mercy of adults, as a trapped animal is at its captor’s, and thus their fates are inextricably entangled with their environments. Mouchette’s name is spoken by a fellow schoolgirl, immediately conjoining her identity with innocence, both of which are corrupted when she’s later captured by a man named Arsène (Jean-Claude Guilbert) who uses and discards her, providing us an alternative outcome to that of the partridges, and maybe also suggesting the fickleness of nature/life (its randomness; incidentally, “Au hasard Balthazar” translates to “Balthazar, at random”), though that could be a misread (again, we apply our own meaning). Toward the end, rabbits are captured and killed (trigger warning), completing a trichotomy of ways in which the life of an innocent can go — or, more accurately, be taken (dually meaning transported and ended).
Is there a message in Bresson’s casting of Jean-Claude Guilbert as Arsène— the actor who played a hapless, doomed, but kind drunkard named Arnold in Au hasard Balthazar (1966), released the year prior to Mouchette? Arnold is, in multiple contexts, a victim in that film — grown yet still helpless to life’s whims, still at risk of abusers (Gérard, Au hasard Balthazar’s principal antagonist and one of cinema’s most deplorable villains, bullies Arnold and assaults Marie, that film’s adolescent protagonist, anticipating Mouchette’s attack), ensnared by the tribulations of his past until his death (indirectly brought upon him by said past, which we presume is the catalyst for his alcoholism). At a macro glance, it’s as if Arnold and Arsène could be different results of the same childhood, or that the latter endured something in early age which the other did not that was akin to what he commits against Mouchette. Arsène even falls and sustains a head injury in a way reminiscent of the drunken fall that kills Arnold; Arsène survives — mirrored incidents, varying destinies. Jean-Claude Guilbert is thought to be the only performer Robert Bresson ever cast twice. It’s not a reach to think such a deliberate perfectionist had a philosophical — or artistic, but what’s the difference? — reason for doing so.
The greatest genius of Bresson (and I suppose the genius in all the best art and artists) is inspiring such deep feelings, particularly from a work devoid of outright dramaticism or anything sensational, that we contemplate the most opaque questions and — this is what separates greatness from genius, in my opinion — consequently reconsider our own lives, circumstances, ideologies, and fates. Mouchette, like the best of Bresson’s filmography, checks every box.
Just as Mouchette consistently denies its setting any sense of morality in favor of perpetuating the notion of inherent amorality, Hemingway’s classic at-sea fable denies its titular protagonist good fortune (or luck) or a tangible reward for his patience, knowledge, risk, and harrowing effort — even after he’s “earned” it with a legendary catch: the fish is devoured by sharks, chunks at a time, on his long boat ride ashore, leaving only a skeleton. After spending 120 pages with the man, we’re broken for him and expect he’ll be as well; we’re surprised and charmed to be proven otherwise. “The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway wrote in his novel A Farewell to Arms, published two decades earlier (1929), “and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” (The Old Man and the Sea includes a thematically synonymous Hemingwayism about man and defeat.)
Hemingway deified the word “truth” in interviews and when discussing writing in general: by writing what is — what happens — with directness and simplicity and without the author’s own commentary, the reader can ingrain their own experiences in the story and be part of it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? He’s said he didn’t write The Old Man and the Sea with symbolism in mind, and we should believe him, but we’ve all battled something and endured periods of misfortune and loneliness, and we’ve all faced challenges that we’ve had to decide to confront or flee. The Old Man and the Sea, like many of Bresson’s films, is a tale of struggle so broad that it’s one of the most applicable and accessible ever written, regardless of what Hemingway had in mind while writing it. (I wouldn’t dare correlate the accessibility of Bresson’s films to Hemingway’s novella, but they’re equally applicable if you’ll allow them to be.)
The old man’s resolve and attitude are both admirable and inspiring, and what Hemingway says about life is simultaneously clear and somewhat cruel. In that way, among others, Bresson’s films are echoes, albeit of fluctuating clarity. Hemingway insists on the old man’s identity being the Old Man despite him having a name (Santiago; as with the Boy, Manolin, a diametric foil to the man and a bundle of optimism and naïveté), imbuing age and experience with a wisdom and mythology that American culture had rejected by the ’50s (elder Americans being predominantly considered out-of-touch, disgruntled, and burdensome). Bresson’s Mouchette, meanwhile, defies age wisdom altogether — adults the source of unfettered and conscienceless wrongdoing (Mouchette’s father ignores the cries of his infant son and later shoves Mouchette on the steps of a church and slaps her at a fair; her teacher scorns her for her raggedy clothes, of which she obviously has no control, and non-participation in class song; a local married man pursues a blatant affair that the townspeople are aware of and don’t challenge) — but similarly emphasizes Mouchette’s attempts at perseverance, a quality that in Mouchette and Au hasard Balthazar Bresson implies is exclusive to youth. And while the old man’s persistence, motivated by the boy, doesn’t end in the victory he’d hoped for, but is rather touched by what feels like a cruel cosmic curse, its lesson remains and sings. Mouchette’s, by contrast, is rejected a final time (by an adult, damningly) in her last scene, a back-breaking straw, and the lesson is vaguer, but no less moving.