Review of Diary of a Country Priest

Robert Bresson's 1950 breakthrough film, Diary Of A Country Priest (Journal D'Un Cure De Campagne), is one of those films that is absolutely antithetical to everything a Hollywood film stands for. It is obsessive, detailed, slow, and opaque. This, however, does not mean it is a great film, as so many knee-jerk critics claim it is. It is not; but it is a very interesting film. Ostensibly, it may seem to be a film on religion and/or suffering, or, as film critic Fréderic Bonnard claims, in The Criterion Collection's DVD essay on the film, a film 'about imprisonment,' but it's neither, really. It's more cogently a film about masochism, guilt, and pathological privation, although it does touch upon religion, suffering, and imprisonment. The film was not only directed by Bresson (his fourth of thirteen films), but also adapted by Bresson from the 1936 novel of the same title by Georges Bernanos. Anyone familiar with the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer will be familiar with the techniques used by Bresson- although this film is less stagey and more intimate in tone, but Bresson's cinematographer, Léonce-Henry Burel, is not as slow and deliberate as Dreyer, nor does the film depend so heavily on the juxtaposition between light and dark as Dreyer's works do. There is a 'lightness' in Bresson's film that is absent from Dreyer's- both in terms of the gauzey and diffused visuals and intellect. This is not to say that Bresson's film lacks depth, it's merely not as dependent upon a grand philosophical posit as Dreyer's films are…. Yet, the film never reaches the heights that other religiously meditative films, such as Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, do, mostly because of the very blandness of the narrative. Whereas Bergman's film transcends religion and cores into universal human behavior, Diary Of A Country Priest merely presents its simple narrative, and if one cannot get into it- for its religious-specific ideas, so be it. Also, the film never gets truly inside the young priest. Why, for example, does he even keep a diary? All it seems to be is a book filled with gossip and his petty and self-serving observations. Yet, the film likens the priest to a Christ-like character, rather than a mere outcast. Since outcasts are universal, why does Bresson decide to affiliate the lead character with the remote Christ and not the ubiquitous nebbish? After all, the priest has no name, and this is clearly done to universalize him, even though a priest, by definition, is a non-universal figure. Not that a Christ complex could not be compelling on screen, just that this particular one is not, for all this character can muster are vapid apothegms such as, 'The desire to pray is already prayer,' "I was a victim of the Holy Agony,' or his dying words, as related by Dufréty: 'What does it matter? Everything is grace.'

Were only those words true this film would recapitulate their meaning. Failing that, it at least tries, something that, again, Hollywood films do not even dare. Perhaps that young priest was on to something?