French master filmmaker Robert Bresson remains, for many serious movieheads, the toughest nut to crack, the most arduous tribulation of filmgoing. It's easy to understand why: a Bresson film, like his timeless 1967 masterpiece Mouchette, can seem as if it were conceived and executed in active resistance against everything that ordinarily makes movies blithely entertaining: spectacle, expressiveness, drama, action, glamour, momentum, sensuality, visual beauty. Cinema at its most popular has been a rousing fulfillment of Richard Wagner's fabled Gesamptkunstwerk - the total art work, a massive fugue of dramatic content, scale, sound, design, composition, acting and theme. But Bresson's severe and stiff-legged films are repudiations of that idea, and thus require a measure of patience and attention we're not used to bringing to movies. Why should we, after all, have to work watching a film - participate and contribute - when movies are supposed to be effortless?

Because you get what you give, that's why, and because of your investment Bresson's cinema can level you in ways that comfortable Hollywood movies cannot. Bresson's defiance in regards to "movieness" is, of course, the key to his brilliance. Like Mouchette, Bresson's films (or at least his mature works, running from 1951's Diary of a Country Priest to 1983's L'Argent) feel like ghost stories experienced from the ghost's perspective - the unprofessional actors ("models," as he calls them) never "act," but rather enact their gestured moments with a stolid, ritualized lifelessness. The stories (more than once derived from agrarian tragedian Georges Bernanos) resemble Christian passions, and in fact Bresson has been long pigeonholed as a "Catholic" filmmaker, although what that may mean remains mysterious. He is totally focused on the moral tragedy of human sin, to the exclusion of all else, but calling a Bresson film "spiritual" is, it seems, simply an escape hatch when you don't know what else to call it.

Think of it this way: to reach the essential, moral truth of his tales, Bresson simply lasers away everything he sees as being false or prevaricating about movie storytelling. Which is almost everything cinematic - movies were from the beginning elaborate illusions, packed with showbiz baloney and theatrical fakery. Acting is pretending, so Bresson insists his actors don't do it. Fancy camera moves and pretty pictures are out. Bresson knows every story is itself a contrivance, so he seeks to make it obvious to a child's eye that he's presenting it purely, without fabrication or filigree or drama masquerading as something "real" or convincing. His camera moves, precisely, only to capture details and gestures, which we are not supposed to "believe" as anything except filmed details and gestures, articulating a human dilemma. He doesn't try to "make" you "feel" his protagonists' experience - by virtue of being alive and conscious, you should be sufficiently capable of empathy and understanding on your own. Bresson's movies are the ultimate no-bullshit cinema, stripped clean of anything that would suggest manipulation or contrivance.

This is the same strategy of traditional Christian icons and parables, for sure, but in terms of form it has less to do with metaphysics than with ethical intent. The essence is vital; the circumstances in which you receive it are incidental, and shouldn't get in the way. Mouchette is a working paradigm this way - it's a wounding, epochal analysis of an abused teenage girl on her blank-faced way to the grave. An inarticulate rural waif living in the middle of nowhere beside an anonymous highway with a dying mother and an alcoholic father, Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is neglected, ritually humiliated, insulted and exploited by everyone around her - an all-too-common paradigm for poverty-stricken, post-agricultural social settings, which was surely Bernanos's point. Bresson is not shy about metaphors: the opening involves the meticulous placing of wire traps in the brush to snag innocent quail, and later on the villagers indulge in a brutal hare shoot, both sequences not so much representing Mouchette's victimhood as demonstrating the cold-blooded dynamics of her world: the violent will take, the weak will suffer. In the middle of the brief film, Bresson allows this sullen, no-exit victim a moment of bliss that's not in Bernanos' novel: a jaunt on a country fair bumper-car ride. But soon thereafter, perhaps disoriented by the momentary experience of joy, Mouchette is lost in the woods and is raped. In Bresson's no nonsense hands, this grim fable becomes a pantomime stations of the cross, completely focused on textural minutiae -a hand's movement, a dropped bottle, a look away - and implicit moral interrogation. Bad things happen, but Bresson's cast is a remarkable tabula rasa, their blank, non-reactive faces making us lean in, wondering and dreading and suffering the lack of definite knowledge. This is from one perspective a kind of realism - we rarely know what people around us are thinking, because real people outside of movies don't telegraph their inner business. But it's also Bresson's formal strategy: we're faced with the cut-to-the-bone import of violence or woe as suffered by Mouchette because the actors don't do the emotional work for us.

Once you're onto Bresson's program, virtually every tightly controlled shot and minimalist gesture in Mouchette feels like a stab wound - take any one scene (as in, when the recently raped girl allows her bed-ridden mother to guzzle gin in bed and then wordlessly replaces the missing liquor with tap water, as her mother begins to die in earnest off-screen), and imagine another moviemaker managing it with as much devastating precision. The effect is not a comfortable display of angst or mournfulness - in which we could ostensibly admire the craft of the actors as we simultaneously sniffle - but an immediate sympathy, emanating from the inside out. Bresson corners you into intimacy, without making it easy or easily forgotten.

By Michael Atkinson