MUBI

This picture proves that there is more to a film then words. The acting is priceless. His focus on details proves to be strong in this film. The emotional story telling seems to pour out of his model’s face (the priest). It shows so much innocent through the child and the youthful priest. The beauty of the film in its look is natural and dark. An interesting story of the priest’s journey with God. His devotion to lost of faith, weaken by illness and by hatered by the people of the village. All in all a very beautiful film.

‘Diary’ is both a clear break from the conventions of mainstream French cinema and the work of a director in transition. Made in 1951, Bresson’s third film displays many of the characteristics that we’ve come to associate with the auteur, including a preference for “models” instead of actors, a plot without any conventional dramatic rhythms, and revealing the effect before the cause. It’s also a paradoxically touching film that ascetically avoids most of the emotionally manipulative techniques cinema typically employs.

The film, based on the celebrated George Bernanos novel of the same name, follows the trials of a young, sickly Catholic priest attempting to take charge of his first parish. Two attempts at adaptation had already been rejected by the author before Bresson: the first, by the popular screenwriters Jean Auraenche and Pierre Bost, had grossly dramatized several key scenes in the film, even altering the novel’s ending; the second attempt, penned by Pere Bruckberger, had transposed the historical setting to that of occupied France, shifting the focus from the tediously spiritual to the politically sensational. By the time Bresson was asked to make it, Bernanos had died.

Both the novel and the film focus on the spiritual life of the priest through his diary. Bresson had stated, “In my eyes, what was striking was the notebook of the diary, in which, through the curé’s pen, an external world becomes an interior world and takes on a spiritual coloration.” Throughout the film, we watch the priest’s hand write in his diary while his voiceover speaks what he has just written, anticipating and often spilling over into the scenes that follow. Most filmmakers would have rejected this approach as boringly redundant, but in Bresson’s hands, the doubling of image and sound intensifies and reinforces the action while illuminating the hidden dimensions of the medium. This deliberately constructed approach stems from Bresson’s own dictum, “Your film – let people feel the soul and heart there, but let it be made like a work of hands.”

Though many critics have lauded ‘Diary’ as one of the most successful adaptations of a novel ever made, Bresson’s real feat was creating a film faithful to the book while simultaneously pressing his own stamp onto every single scene. And while his first two films feel more like the works of a genius frustrated by an industry hostile to artistic originality, ‘Diary’ exudes an aura of discovery. Bresson had abandoned the studios and stages to film in the countryside, and had chosen Claude Laydu, an aspiring Swiss actor just starting out in acting school, to play the lead in his film. And though he filled out much of the remaining cast with professional actors, he tightly controlled their performances, speech, and movements, leading several to bitterly complain that he wouldn’t allow them to exhibit the “expressiveness” they had learned on the stage. Unlike his later films, however, Bresson gave great freedom to his cinematographer, yielding a more conventional mix of medium and long-range shots, closeups, and even tracking shots. We’re left with a greater sense of spatial and inter-character relationships than in his later films, and this, coupled with a lamentably generic score, may serve as a stepping stone into Bresson’s world for any newcomers to the auteur.



Last Word: ‘Diary’ was a seminal moment for film; fresh and unexpected, it expanded the medium’s horizons and irrevocably hurtled Bresson down his brilliant, tortured career.

A beautiful film, layered and nuanced and delicate. Bresson’s country priest is hanging on by the quill of his pen, it’s as if making his mark on a page is the only way he can validate himself or leave some kind of indication that he was alive at all. Based on a pre war novel, the story unfolds of a modest young cleric taking his post in a small rural community, and from the opening sequence it’s made apparent that he is an outsider or worse, an intruder. The shy priest unwittingly observes an illicit liason, the repercussions of which he can not know will shake the small town to the core. The deliberately beatific Claude Laydu plays the title role, and Bresson insisted on a practicing believer in the role, one assumes in the hope of a achieving a kind of verrisimilitude in the scenes where a ‘rapture’ of sorts is required. The young priests tools with which he has to deal with the reality he encounters prove to be singulaurly inadequate and he turns for advice to an older priest in a neigbouring parish. The battle is between weary pragmatism, represented by a Doctor and by the older priest and the idealism and ethereal notions of the young priest.

The day to day ennui of a country town gives the priest plenty of time to contemplate eternity. His is a lonely and spartan life, which serves to accentuates the contact he does have with other characters. Events that would be of little consequence normally take on a wider significance because most of the things humans take for granted in a social context are denied him. The divide between what he aspires to for the human heart and the reality of what it does is a troubling one for him, so he falls deeper into his spiritual trance, only to be awoken with a start when circumstances come breaking through. Almost as a physical manifestation of this inner turmoil the young priest starts to exhibit signs of serious illness. His diet is inadequate to sustain him bodily, and maybe Bresson is making the point therefore his spiritual sustenance is also not enough for a man to live effectively when he’s so removed from the real world.

The weight of the film falls upon Ladyu’s shoulders, he’s in virtually every scene and carries it off beautifully, it’s a great piece of casting.
The look of the film, sombre and spare, set the tone for Bressons work for years to come, as with the pacing and tone. For an agnostic Bresson was interested in trancendant experiences, and seemed to be suggesting they need not be the sole province of the religious.
The Priests god, as with Bergmans, was a silent one and when all was said and done the Priest was left alone. His community was a celestial one, and so proved of no use to him here. The doctor had no faith in an after life, and so looked after the community he lived with in order to find meaning. It’s the human dilemma, we are alone, but we are alone together.