Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1946)

Michel Simon in Panique

Cast: Michel Simon, Viviane Romance, Max Dalban, Émile Drain, Guy Favières, Louis Florencie, Charles Dorat, Lucas Gridoux. Screenplay: Charles Spaak, Julien Duvivier, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer. Production design: Serge Piménoff. Film editing: Marthe Poncin. Music: Jean Wiener.

Panique is widely interpreted as a post-war French reaction to collaborators in the German occupation, a study of how mob violence can germinate. But it holds its own today as a noirish tale of crime and punishment gone wrong. Michel Simon plays a solitary misanthrope, a far cry from his more devil-may-care raffish slobs in Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) and Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932). His M. Hire keeps to himself in the busybody-filled neighborhood where he lives, which only generates suspicion when an elderly woman is murdered. The real murderer and his girlfriend fan the flames of suspicion by planting evidence against M. Hire, with tragic results for the innocent man. The film has a sour, pessimistic tone to it that may reflect Duvivier's attitude on returning to France after his wartime exile in Hollywood.

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Nadine Nortier in Mouchette

Mouchette: Nadine Nortier
Arsène: Jean-Claude Guilbert
Mouchette's Mother: Marie Cardinal
Mouchette's Father: Paul Hébert
Mathieu: Jean Viminet
Schoolteacher: Liliane Princet
Undertaker: Suzanne Huguenin '
Luisa: Marine Trichet
Grocery Shop Owner: Raymonde Chabrun

Director: Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Film editing: Raymond Lamy
Music: Jean Wiener

I used to think that Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was the most depressing and enigmatic of Robert Bresson's works, but I hadn't seen Mouchette. It's an unsparing film, in which I can't find even a feint at Bresson's usual religious consolation or symbology. Mouchette's name means "little fly," and her existence is as brief and mucky as that. Yes, I've read the essays on Bresson and on Georges Bernanos's source novel that posit some kind of redemptive motif in Mouchette's bleak life, but experiencing the film doesn't reinforce that for me. Abused endlessly, Mouchette is no martyr, no saint; she is as spiteful and deluded as you might expect. She refers to her rapist as her lover, and once her mother, to whom she was at least dutiful, is dead, there seems nothing to which she can connect, even her baby brother, whom she carelessly swaddles, and when she goes out to get milk for him she dawdles, leaving him at the mercy of her gin-soaked father and brother. She is too proud to accept charity, scrubbing her muddy shoes into the carpet of the crabby old lady who at least is kind enough to give her a shroud for her mother and some clothes for herself. When she goes out to roll down a slope next to a pond, it looks like she's spitefully dirtying these gifts. And then we realize that what looks like mean-spirited play is in fact preparation for a most unusual suicide, which Bresson doesn't actually film but leaves us to infer. The film has been called tragic, but it looks to me like unfettered naturalism.