Diary of a Country Priest (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Diary of a Country Priest (1951) -- R. Bresson

Whenever I watch a Bresson film, I always feel that there is something I'm not quite grasping, that is just out of my reach.  I think it may be a theological principle related to "grace" or "salvation" that I never learned, whereby characters who suffer tremendously, needlessly, and often not as a result of any of their own actions (e.g., Balthazar or Mouchette) attain some sort of spiritual transcendence (thanks perhaps to a benevolent Christian god).  I'm not quite sure how these things work together but they appear consistently in Bresson's oeuvre. In this film, his later style of focusing the camera on the small details of hands at work on sometimes mundane tasks and on the often serious but blank faces of the non-actor protagonists is only beginning to crystalize (his next film, A Man Escaped, is a masterpiece). Still, there is an intensity that grows from the camera's singular preoccupation with Claude Laydu who plays a young priest taking over his first parish in a French country town full of hostility toward him.  He keeps a diary in which he reports (in voiceover) the events that unfold as he attempts to resolve a family's spiritual and moral crisis.  He is sick and his grasp on consciousness and possibly reality seems tenuous. We never know if he is making the right decisions and he does not seem to know himself.  Nevertheless, he seems to achieve "grace" by persevering in his course despite suffering, both physical and in his duties.