Critics reviews

It would seem likely that a film about the frustrations of a Catholic priest in provincial France made during the high period of postwar French existential hand-wringing would lose some of its appeal over the last six decades. Yet it is impossible not to be overawed by the absolute economy of means, singularity of vision, moral seriousness, and unfaltering confidence that are everywhere on display in this early Bresson masterpiece.

Its every sound and image unobtrusively precise, Diary of a Country Priest is a movie of emphatic understatement: contemplative yet abrupt, eloquent and blunt, oblique but lucid... Few artists since the Renaissance have so convincingly wed the aesthetic to the spiritual. Diary's final shot makes its allegory absolutely apparent even as the priest's last words—"All is grace"—suggest cinema itself is the holy sacrament.

This is the film that inaugurated the influential Bressonian style (a cast composed primarily of nonprofessionals; narrative, visuals and soundtrack pared down to the barest essentials). Hereafter, the writer-director's name would be synonymous with the term austere, and fittingly, there's not one wasted gesture... When the moment of illumination arrives, the full scope of the film's brilliance hits you with the force of a knockout punch.

Repeatedly returning to the opening image of a diary page being filled (as the priest also communicates his writings via voiceover), Diary of a Country Priest gracefully perceives his worldview and embraces his maddening personal conflicts. God feels absent from the film, but not for lack of want, and Laydu's intensely introverted modulations suggest one who has unconsciously taken the weight of the world on their back to the point of uselessness—not just to others, but to himself.

Ruthless compression gives a world stripped to inhospitable essentials, the camera frames it then dollies in before fading to black; the slow lowering of eyes or the turn of a head are enough for an epiphany, the soundscape is a remarkable trove of off-screen groans and murmurs. The cornerstone is a ten-minute tug-of-war for the soul of la Comtesse, a bravura piece of suffocation punctuated unforgettably by leaves being raked by the window.

Rarely have form and content been married as harmoniously as in director Robert Bresson's 1951 breakthrough Diary Of A Country Priest... Nothing in the film happens by accident: The stark images suggest a village bereft of natural and spiritual life, the camera moves only to emphasize key moments, and the soundtrack enforces the title character's isolation from the outside world.

Bresson is relentless in capturing the squalid daily routines of the provincial setting. Though often regarded as the dramatization of a spiritual journey, the film is remarkably sensuous in its details. Bresson enlisted Abel Gance's cinematographer, Léonce-Henry Burel, to give the exterior shots (especially the somewhat fantastic night scenes) an especially startling realism.

Robert Bresson creates a visually spare and deeply moving film on faith, alienation, and perseverance in Diary of a Country Priest. Using minimal dialogue, introspective journal entries, and isolated long and medium shots, Bresson presents the harsh reality and inherently misunderstood existence of a man of faith in a secular world, where altruism and unyielding devotion are viewed with cynicism and distrust.

Robert Bresson's film is above all the story of a failure, of a man who is completely incapable of leaving an impression on the world. It is the story of defeat, of a faint trace of spirit left behind and then erased all too quickly. It is a story about someone who tries his best to throw things off balance, and whose best efforts are finally squelched by the weighty order of things.

Bresson is ahead of our time almost as far as he was of his own. He is still "difficult". Perhaps the performances in his films are more attuned to today's sensibilities. What Bazin regarded as "poor acting" in this film is a goal which some professional actors now seek and which I have discussed elsewhere as "impressionistic" acting (7), moving from the exterior to the interior.

This spare, intense 1950 film, adapted from Georges Bernanos' novel, is Robert Bresson at his greatest and most difficult, building a profound sense of a higher order through its relentless detailing of the cold, small facts of everyday life. A masterpiece, beyond question.

Watching this spiritual odyssey is almost a religious experience in itself, but one which has nothing to do with faith or dogma, everything to do with Bresson's unique ability to exteriorise an interior world.