Preceded by-La Joconde: Histoire d'une obsession (Henri Gruel, 1958): Mona Lisa: Story of an Obsession. "Like Jupiter, Mona Lisa drives the people she wants crazy, and in this game she wins every time"--Boris Vian. Written by Vian. Edited by Henri Colpi. (14 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm) Mouchette is a visual study of a state of mind. Based on a book by Georges Bernanos, author of The Diary of a Country Priest, it has affinities with that Bresson film but perhaps even more with Au hasard Balthazar (see June 17) in its depiction of the limits of quiet suffering and humiliation a living being can endure. Fourteen-year-old Mouchette has been denied a childhood by an alcoholic father and a seriously ill mother. Despised and rejected, she observes the adult world from a position of extreme isolation; like the donkey Balthazar she has no language in which to express her despair. A measure of defiance is brought out in her complicity with the village poacher, Arsène, but he takes cruel advantage of her affection. This final lesson in the callousness of adults informs Mouchette's first, and last, act of open rebellion. "This Calvary of the last twenty-four hours of her life is unbearably moving. It contains two supreme sequences: Mouchette's brief moment of joy in a surprisingly erotic carnival scene, and her suicide, which, backed by the Monteverdi Magnificat, is perhaps one of the great scenes of exaltation in all cinema" (New York Film Festival '68).