1967
Meaningless Rating: ****
How much humiliation can one girl take? It's not enough she's poor; it's not enough she has no future: Mouchette is the outlet for the town's misery: she is admonished as a slut; her nose is shoved into piano keys during class; she is slapped by her father in front of a boy at a crowded carnival; she is raped by the town epileptic (which, in a an attempt to cope, she twists into something she can own): no single humiliation will suffice. She tries talking to her mother, but the baby wails and her mother dies: Mouchette cries in silence, alone. She fights back in the only ways her juvenile mind can reason - throwing dirt at classmates; wiping mud from her ill-fitting clogs onto a nice rug; tearing and soiling her mother's burial shroud, a gift from a supposedly kind woman... But these people are not kind; these people are polite, and politeness in spite of their judgement is perhaps worse: it is pity, mere social obligation; politeness is expecting, and in that expectation there is animosity and even violence. The only one capable of true kindness is Mouchette, and though she tries to harden herself to the world, the sensitivity inherent in that, needed for that, leaves her exposed, and so her undoing is inevitable. Her life, or the lack thereof, is inevitable... And so she takes control in the only way she can, by ending it.
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