Robert Bresson's cinematic universe offers no comfort. It is a realm of formal asceticism and spiritual rigor that operates on the viewer like a scalpel, cutting beyond the surface of the narrative to expose the naked soul of his characters. Mouchette, a pure and almost unbearable distillation of his poetics, is perhaps the deepest incision. The film opens with a trap, a snare that snaps shut and imprisons a bird. It is not a simple prologue, but the declaration of intent of an entire work: the world is a trap and Mouchette, its young protagonist, is the creature destined to end up in it, with the same inevitable fatality.

Adapted from the novel by Georges Bernanos, already the source for his masterpiece Diary of a Country Priest, the film throws us into a rural and timeless France, a geography of despair made of mud, incessant rain, and low horizons. Mouchette (an extraordinary non-actress, Nadine Nortier, whose face is a mask of defiance and repressed pain) is an outcast by definition. At school she is the outcast, at home she is the servant of an alcoholic and violent father and a dying mother. Her existence is a dull accumulation of humiliations, a litany of small and large cruelties. The sound of her clogs on the muddy ground is not a mere sound detail, but the metronome of her imprisonment, an obstinate rhythm that marks a via crucis without redemption. Bresson, with his belief in “cinematography” as an art of revelation rather than representation, films her not with pity, but with the precision of an entomologist studying a rare specimen. He does not ask us to “identify” with Mouchette; he commands us to observe her, to witness her Via Dolorosa.

Bresson's greatness lies in his method, a form of radical asceticism that places him in direct opposition to the cinema of his time and, even more so, to that of today. His actors, whom he called “models,” are emptied of all psychological intention. They recite their lines with an almost liturgical flatness, their gestures reduced to the essential. Hands grasping a glass, feet dragging through the mud, faces frozen in impenetrable grimaces: these are the hieroglyphics through which Bresson speaks to us of the spirit. It is a technique rooted in Jansenist theology, with its bleak vision of a world devoid of grace, where salvation is an arbitrary and almost impossible gift. Bresson's framing, so rigorous and precise, does not seek beauty; it seeks truth in matter. There is an almost pictorial affinity with the Flemish primitives in the way he gives weight and consistency to every object, every texture, as if spiritual drama could only be grasped through its most concrete and earthly manifestation.

If Au hasard Balthazar, shot the previous year, is its mirror twin—the story of suffering through the eyes of a donkey, a Christological creature par excellence—Mouchette is its human counterpart, even more desperate because it is aware. Balthazar suffers, Mouchette rebels. Her rebellion, however, is that of a caged animal: a look of contempt, a throw of mud, small acts of sabotage against a cosmic order that has already condemned her. An illuminating parallel could be drawn not so much with contemporary portrayals of rebellious adolescents such as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut's The 400 Blows – animated by a vitality and desire to escape that are completely absent in Mouchette – as with the disinherited and almost grotesque characters of the American writer Flannery O'Connor. As in her stories of the Deep South, here too violence and brutality are not instruments of social criticism, but theological events, moments in which the absence of God becomes palpable, almost a scream in the silence.

The film is studded with sequences that are imprinted on the memory with the force of a trauma. The bumper car ride at the village fair is an emblematic moment: for a moment, amid the choreographed violence of the collisions and the deafening music, Mouchette experiences a form of communion, a physical contact that is almost a caress. But it is a fleeting joy, an illusion that dissolves as soon as the lights go out, leaving her more alone than before. Her encounter with the poacher Arsène, an ambiguous figure who is both protector and executioner, culminates in sexual violence, filmed by Bresson with chilling modesty. We do not see the act, but we feel its weight, its consequence, yet another humiliation inflicted on a body that is already a catalogue of wounds. In this, Bresson reveals himself to be the antithesis of directors such as Buñuel, who in Los Olvidados uses cruelty for the purposes of social denunciation and surrealist provocation. For Bresson, cruelty is a state of being, a metaphysical condition of the post-lapsarian world.

The soundtrack, as always in his cinema, is used dialectically. The use of a fragment of Monteverdi's Magnificat does not serve to elevate the scene or offer consolation. On the contrary, the sacred music, which sings the glory of a God who “has scattered the proud” and “lifted up the lowly,” clashes in an almost blasphemous way with the fate of Mouchette, lowly among the lowly, to whom no exaltation is granted. The divine bursts into the profane not to redeem it, but to emphasize its abysmal distance. It is a gesture of disconcerting modernity, anticipating the alienating use of music in Kubrick or Haneke, where classical beauty is juxtaposed with the horror of the human condition.

And then there is the ending, one of the most discussed and powerful sequences in the history of cinema. After the last, definitive cruelty—the community's contempt for her pain—Mouchette finds herself alone, near a stream. She is wearing a white dress, a wedding shroud given to her almost as a mockery. She begins to roll down the grassy slope, once, twice, as if in a macabre child's game. The third time, her body slips into the water and disappears. Suicide? Accident? Liberation? Bresson refuses to give a psychological answer. It is a purely physical act, a surrender to gravity. Her body, which has been the target of all violence, finds a terrible peace in dissolution, in a sort of reverse baptism that does not purify but annihilates. It is a choreography of final submission to the laws of matter, the last, silent act of an existence that has been nothing but weight and fall.

Seeing Mouchette today, in an era of consolatory narratives and easy empathy, is an almost physical experience. It is a film that hurts, that drains, that leaves the viewer in a silence laden with unanswered questions. It is not a work to be loved lightly; it is a monolith to be respected with awe, a relentless testament to the loneliness of the soul in a world that has forgotten how to pray. An absolute masterpiece, necessary and terrible, which confirms cinema not only as an art form, but as an instrument of spiritual inquiry, even when the only thing it finds is an abysmal absence.