After the manifold splendours of Balthazar, Mouchette seems an altogether thinner experience, exquisite but frail, as though Bresson this time had chosen to tell only the story of Marie without the counterpoint of Balthazar. Unlike the earlier film, which develops as a series of concentric circles spreading from the tethered souls of Marie and Balthazar, Mouchette … drives straight as an arrow towards its inevitable end in Mouchette's abdication from life….

At the same time, by any other standards than Balthazar, Mouchette is a masterpiece: a Bresson film pure and simple with its extraordinary correspondances between sound and gesture to evoke the unspoken and the unseen. No one but Bresson, for instance, could have conceived that extraordinary dialogue between hands, veiled eyes and inanimate objects which pinpoints the triangle relationship between Arsene, Louisa and the gamekeeper….

The real importance of Mouchette, however, is that it confirms a new departure...