A friend sent me a link to the trailer of a
movie by Robert Bresson titled "Mouchette." ( a rustic, foul-mouthed girl aged
14). When I watched the trailer (my first
contact with Bresson and Bernano, btw) there were certain, very tenuous,
images which suggested me a few moments related to the metaphorical
aspects present in the relationship between Nabokov's Humbert Humbert
and Lolita.
I would not have posed the question to the list
(ie: "Was Nabokov, known for his knowledge about movies, in
any interested in Bresson, or, in George Bernanos?"), were it not that
Nabokov had initially considered naming his Dolores/Lo/Lolita, "Juanita," after
the French monarchist woman-warrior St. Jeanne d'Arc,* and this French/Latin
double connection remains unclear for me.
........................................................................................
*The original writer of "Mouchette",
George Bernanos, descends from Jeanne D'Arc through a brother of hers.
Bernanos was a monarchist, fought in and helped to create the French
resistance, was an exile ( to Brazil, but he kept writing in French), and a
fervent nationalist Catholic.
His "La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette" is
unrelated to his former novel about "Mouchette" ("little fly").
Another novel of his was made into a
movie in 1987, by M. Pialat, and won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes
Festival, with young Gerard Depardieu as a priest, and Sandrine Bonnaire in
the role of Brenano's first "Mouchette" (aged 16). This first Mouchette
kills herself and is saved by "heavenly grace".
The miracles presented by Bernanos/Bresson
don't present a classic religious of a saving grace, but
their miracles are closer to something "Unheimlich," as the intrusion of
the imponderable, the absurd and the impossible into human lives.
Bresson was also inspired by Dostoevsky
("Pickpocket", "Une Femme Douce", "Nuits Blanches") and Tolstoy. He filmed "Au
Hasard, Balthasar" in 1966, a year before "Mouchette." His "Process of Jeanne d'Arc" dates from 1962.
Later he filmed something related to the Graal legend ("Lancelot du Lac")
and his vision is more sadistic than religious.
The information above was informally passed to
me by Luiz F.Gallego Soares.