First of all, Bresson killed it with this name of this movie. And the poster too.

I’ve found that sometimes I’m exactly on Bresson’s wavelength, e.g., “Pickpocket” and “L’Argent.” And sometimes I’m just not, e.g., “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Mouchette.” This 1977 meditation on aimless youth in search of meaning falls somewhere in between. First, I have to admit I was really kind of exhausted when I sat down for a matinee screening of this movie, and I found it hard not to nod off repeatedly for about the first half-hour, and so by the time I roused myself awake I was quite confused by what was going on. But when I went back to watch that initial part at home, I realized I hadn’t really missed very much—the plot structure here is maybe best described as just the thinnest scaffolding. Character relationships seem tangential at best, or obscured at the very least. What Bresson seems most interested in are the existential questions that his actors raise, which tend to fall along the lines of, “What’s the point of all of this?” Or maybe they’re more accurately summarized as, “Why doesn’t anything seem to have a point in this world?” His strategy is to expose that sense of nothingness by vacuuming out virtually all emotional exuberance, positive or negative, leaving his characters to function as cogs in a sparse, unfeeling machine of a world. The problem though is his actors are generally so photogenic that that vacuum can often feel less like stark asceticism than it does vacuous stylishness. Bresson’s images often, especially here, foreshadow a world of dour, minimal, intellectually superficial magazine ads for luxury fashion houses. They’re lovely to look at, but any philosophical perspective they offer is just a masquerade for commerce. That downstream effect is not necessarily the fault of Bresson or of this movie, but by being so willfully obtuse while also indulging in such physical beauty, it’s hard not to fall into the trap of just admiring the aesthetic virtue instead of grokking the conceptual framework. Could be worse, for sure.

Watched it on DCP at Film Forum on a beautiful, late September day. I really should’ve been outside instead.