The Face Knife

continued, sort of, from Boudu Saved From Drowning

Robert Bresson’s Mouchette famously ends with the drowning death of the title urchin, after a long night during which she was raped and her mother died. The next morning, a succession of characters offer Mouchette charity, in the form of clothes, in the form of food, but she spurns them all before rolling down the embankment and into the water. On the face of it, it certainly seems like Mouchette was in a helpless situation and couldn’t be “saved,” despite any help that could be offered her. The fact that the help in question is offered in the spirit of pity rather than empathy doesn’t make a difference.

In what little reading I’ve done about Bresson, the idea of him being a Jansenist filmmaker is quite prominent. Most “modern” Catholicism and Christianity stress “works” as the key to the kingdom of Heaven, so grappling with the Jansenist ideas of original sin and predestination can be alienating. The idea that human effort matters little in determining one’s place in eternity is antithetical to the more or less liberal, secular values of the Western World.

Even the most fervent believers in “free will” cannot deny that there are three circumstances of a person’s life that are completely out of one’s control: where you were born, when you were born, and to whom you were born. These are, for lack of a better word, Fate, and Mouchette’s Fate seems inescapable when it comes to all three.

Jansenist thought posits that one thing can redeem the human soul: grace. Recall the end of Diary of a Country Priest: “all is grace.” I’m not sure that that would hold in Mouchette, because the world is a torturous place - a mudscape where the sound of metal scraping on metal shakes the night. You can almost smell the carbon monoxide given off by the trucks that pass Mouchette’s hovel.

In Catholic dogma, God can bestow his Grace on the supplicant through the Sacraments, the first of which, and the most important, because it removes the stigma of Original Sin, is Baptism. Is Mouchette’s drowning a baptism, or a denial of the possibility of Grace? Our urge to be charitable - born of pity - leads us to the first explanation, but maybe the answer is not so kind.

I like to think of myself as a charitable person. I’ve given change to the homeless, donated my blood (and refused the complimentary cookie), shopped at the Salvation Army for cool clothes and every Thanksgiving I have every intention of bringing in some canned goods for my office’s food drive. But even though I am by all evidence bursting with love for the unfortunate, if I ever see a tramp in mortal danger I’m going to mind my own business. Call me a hobophobe if you’d like, but if fiction is any indication, saving a tramp will totally fuck up your life.

Still, although my heart has been thus hardened, I can’t help feel pity for the poor and weak. But is “pity” a good reason to be charitable, or even the right reason? Is the “right” reason different if you’re (even nominally) a Christian or secular humanist?

The great part about the humanism of Renoir or Bresson is that it never champions asceticism - any moral or ethical message is always grounded in the inescapable facts of our corporal bodies and their needs and limitations. I think a lot of “spiritual” or “philosophical” artwork has the tendency to elide the realities of the body, though those realities are always present (and almost by definition, necessary) in the very highest art.

The body of Boudu is mostly whiskers and rags covering the great Michel Simon. Boudu has a companion, a dog, who runs away in the first scene. This is apparently the last straw, and Boudu throws himself in the Seine.

There’s a cliche that killing yourself by hanging is a unconscious wish to punish yourself for a crime and the metaphorical implications of, say, blowing your head off with a shotgun are pretty apparent. As far as tossing yourself in a body of water with the intention of not surfacing until you’re blue and bloated, my best guess is that it’s tantamount to a baptism, a desire to be close to God. Perhaps, though, it is an anti-baptism…

In any case, Boudu certainly thinks Paradise can be found on the riverbed and is justly peeved at the bourgeois bookseller, Lestingois, who pulls him from the Seine. I like Lestingois, and it’s harder to fault him as a benefactor than it is some other more supercilious would-be literary saints. When we are introduced to him, we are made immediately aware of his affair with his maid, and although he is in love with books and the literary life he doesn’t seem to be a snob. He’s aware of his faults and doesn’t seem to think he’s better than anyone else (except perhaps his wife). Thus it’s hard to see the effect that Boudu has on his life as any sort of ‘comeuppance,’ unless we see it as comeuppance for the ’sins’ of a class of people rather than any individuals within a class.

Boudu totally screws up the social order by failing to keep his bodily impulses constrained within the rules of a household. He spits everywhere, chases the maid and woman of the house around, and generally messes up the place. He’s the one-man version of the hobo wrecking crew/last supper in Viridiana.

Ultimately, instead of throwing Boudu out on his muttonchops, Lestingois attempts to “normalize” the odd relationships that develop between the 4 people living in the house, but Boudu will have none of it. He capsizes the whole enterprises and floats away, reclaiming some rags from a scarecrow upon his liberation.

Has charity, in this case, failed, and if so, who has it failed? Is Boudu’s intransigence a rebellion against those who (arguably, I would say) patronize him, or is it just that some people can’t be “saved”?

To be continued Monday in a review of Mouchette (1967)

Boudu Saved from Drowning is available on Region 1 DVD