It’s time to tell about essential, minimal, brutal things in Life. Isn’t it?

Akan had tried terribly hard to postpone this moment when a dark whispering murmur of the wind would came.

But it happened despite that.
This wind was the announcement of death.
Somebody in the tower was going to leave tragically.
This doll didn’t deserve to die alone nor endure this hard life.
This black day was actually a relief for this tenant, a squatter in fact.

She had been hiding in a basement for a few days after having run away from Bresson-City.

Her name was Doll “Mouchette”.

She came from the county of Bernanoshire, where she had lived in hardship in Bresson-city.
There she had faced major difficulties: a dying mother, an alcoholic father who was absent, and a baby brother in need of care.

She had been subjected to derision from her teachers.

“Nothing but a little savage” was how the Bresson-city school-teacher had described fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view had been echoed by every right-thinking local citizen.
Mouchette had been alone, completely alone, against everyone.”

Her mother was too sick to get out of bed,  Mouchette had been forced to take on the motherly tasks, preparing everyone’s meals and feeding her younger sibling.

At one point, it even looked like she might try breastfeeding when there was no fire on the stove to heat the baby’s milk.

She had been forced to be an adult even before her body was capable.
Also one dark night she had been raped by a bad man in a wood.

As tragedies continued to pile up, she had decided to leave Bresson-city and to take her life into her own hands, like a last act of defiance.
Mouchette doll was the most beautiful of dolls despite her tangled black hair, her dirty nails, and her wooden clogs.
Akan didn’t know Mouchette, until she had gone to bathe in the river with her friend Betsy, anorexic paper-doll and the severed hand of the doll who had disappeared.
It was the spring of 2011 in April.
It was still very chilly and the wind was twisting and twirling the petals of the young trees in bloom.
This supremely delicate dance had attracted a sad person.

“Mouchette finds rescue and peace in the nature”.

A young doll soiled by the earth and misery, with black hair matted and covered with dust, was sitting, stretched out on the ground, on the green bank: Mouchette.

Betsy who was unable to swim, given that her paper body would disintegrate, was also seated on the other side of the river, looking after the towels of her friends, Akan and Syndra Raynaud.

Akan and Syndra were playing in the cool water splashing each other and diving into the depths.
Their bodies glided in the light, with the thinness of Akan’s body magnificent in the light of the ripples, her skin both pale and livid embellishing the river.
Syndra, the severed hand of the doll who had disappeared, with her long fingers, mimicked the touching grace of a starfish.
Syndra became a mischievous mermaid jumping in the silvery waters; her fingers did not feel the slightest cold or the slightest increase in temperature: a kind of provisional harmony!

Suddenly a cry, Betsy, panicked, helpless, witness of the worst, the death of Mouchette.

Mouchette had let herself roll from the top of the bank like a lifeless puppet carried away by her own momentum down the slope.

{Of course, she does it alone, so maybe Bresson isn’t letting us off the hook after all.

Maybe putting up with a hard life leads us to even harder, more isolated positions.

In the prologue, Mouchette’s mother refers to a stone that is inside her, a metaphor for her illness.

But then, it could be where we all end up, weighted down, and the more we struggle, like a bird ensnared in a poacher’s trap, the more it hurts.

Bresson only releases Mouchette by letting that full weight land on her, and thus pushing her under.}

Mouchette let herself slide into the cold water, drown in icy water, on this beautiful sunny morning in mid-April.

Akan and Syndra had seen nothing, but felt the tumult of the circles in the water left by the despairing leap of the Doll Mouchette.

Betsy stiff with pain, dried out with sadness, stiffened even more before the now empty water.

It was April 14, 2011, Doll Mouchette would leave an enormous hole in the lives of Akan and her friends.

Bresson, director of the masterpiece, says:

“Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty.

She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.”

For Mouchette. Alice Odilon December 2010.