In the heart of the swinging sixties, the year of Sgt Pepper, the year before the Paris riots, Bresson was engaged in doing what he always did, impervious to trends and the vagueries of fashion, his politics were timeless… the politics of the personal.

Mouchette is in some ways his ‘Virgin Spring’, albeit de-mythologised and de-beautified, and a film Bergman enjoyed apparently. A film about belonging and hope, or the lack of it, without artifice or sentimentality. In a series of vignettes we see Mouchette going about her routines, carving out her niche in the village, getting glimpses of a future that may await, via the fate of her terminally ill mother and the local bar girl Louisa. We see her out of step with her classmates at school, both literally (the clogs) and figuratively via the note she can’t sing in the school choir once she’s made to join in. While they throw mud at her via insults, the boys by dropping their pants, the girls by exclusion, she has no recourse but to literally return fire. A misfit in village life, and a functionary to her family, the only bright spot is a day at a fun fair. Mouchette smiles at a boy on the dodgem cars, and follows him to a shooting gallery, only to have her father slap her face and call her a slut. Religion is no help and is given short shrift by Bresson, she’s pushed into church by her father, and walked past by a priest as if she isn’t there.

Mouchette has no reference point to anchor affection in her life, her calling the poacher she encounters her ‘lover’ only heightens the tragedy. She realises that in this world men are the hunters and she is fair game via a rabbit shoot she witnesses. Bresson visually references Renoirs ‘Rules Of The Game’ here, surely no accident, telling us that there are rules that Mouchette must play by. Mouchette wraps herself in the clothes of conformity, given to her by an old lady who loves the dead, and choses not to play.

Nadine Nortier is the perfect embodiment of Bressons vision, with eyes that are heartbreaking in their expressiveness. An essential part of a great French tradition of brilliant films, 400 Blows, Forbidden Games and L’Enfance Nue, examining childhood and adolesence.A film that will haunt any viewer and essential Bresson.