Robert Bresson: Journal d'un Curé de Campagne / Diary of a Country Priest (1951)

(Part 4 of my Robert Bresson retrospective.  See the sidebar for prior posts.)

I found Bresson’s first two full-length works, Les Anges du Péché and Les dames du Bois de Boulogne to both be borderline great films. However, when compared to his next film, Journal d'un curé de campagne aka Diary of a Country Priest those two films can’t help but come across as minor. The fingerprints of the prior films can still be seen on the proceedings here -- Bresson’s eye for capturing only the most essential elements in his shots has been apparent since the beginning and the dialing in on a redemptive theme is central to all three films. The tableau of faith and the Church, along with the similarity of the pivotal scene pitting a devout idealist fighting for a lost soul, also make this and Les Anges stand out as similar. Yet, with Diary of a Country Priest Bresson makes bold steps in terms of aesthetic and thematic acuity, stripping away all semblance of melodrama, toning down the use of music, implementing his preferred “models” in place of (most) actors, and going even further with his economical use of time construction, all working toward achieving the austere tenor that is synonymous with his name.

The film’s central conceit revolves around Bresson’s choice in delivering the film’s narrative, using a clever and affecting triangulation of spoken word (narration), written word (words written into a diary^*), and image (on-screen action) to give a full accounting of the action. This melding of styles creates an affectation whereby, as Andre Bazin stated, “the most moving moments of the film are those in which the text and image are saying the same thing, each however in its own way.” In the hands of a lesser director this use of voiceover narration along with the simultaneous filming of the a hand putting pen to paper could easily be used as a superfluous shortcut or an expository crutch. Bresson is able to avoid such an issue, using the expressive nature of the words to add depth, while still keeping the images sparse and the action efficient (core tenants of Bresson’s method). It’s an elegant overall effect that allows the film to get directly to the heart of its themes and to acutely focus our connection with the lead character.

Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos (and adapted by Bresson himself), the story revolves around an unnamed young priest (Claude Laydu) starting his first parish in the French town of Ambricourt. Laydu, in his first ever role, deserves equal credit with Bresson in making the film’s methods work. As Bresson’s first “actor-model,” (a Bressonian construct describing someone who doesn’t perform, per se, but instead “displays their soul” to the camera) his performance is perfectly in tune with the tenor of the film, showcasing the proper naiveté and emotion (or lack thereof) via his face and line readings. Together, Bresson and Laydu are able to match the introspective thoughts and words of the diary with a face and voice that attests to the priest’s inner struggles and constant searching for God in the world. Laydu’s bulging eyes, furrowed brow, and gaunt demeanor are obvious inspirations to Bresson’s vision here, with him focusing on Laydu’s expressiveness throughout in a very similar vein to how Maria Falconetti’s iconic look shapes Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The priest quickly finds out that this town of Ambricourt is a spiritual wasteland and his hopes of affecting the people of the town are summarily crushed, dismissal coming from all angles. Via his diary and voiceover, the priest makes clear his feelings of isolation and despair: an inability to pray, a feeling that God has left him and, perhaps, that he has even lost his faith. His mere presence elicits a look of scorn from the Count (Jean Riveyre) and his mistress, Louise (Nicole Maurey). He is openly mocked by the children in his catechism class. Only one person shows up to daily mass. The Count’s daughter, Chantal (Nicole Ladmiral), is angry at her father’s affair and dismissive of her mother, the Countess (Rachel Berendt), taking out her anger on the priest. The Countess herself is resentful of God for the death of her young son, belittling the priest when they first meet.

In addition, due to horrible stomach pains, he is forced to consume only wine soaked bread, making him all the weaker. Soon, his subsistence on these sacraments will cause the town to believe him a “drunkard.” A local doctor checks on his condition, with his diagnosis being that the priest’s poor health is a result of his parents’ alcohol intake while he was in utero, or as the doctor so wonderfully puts it, “pickled from birth.” Shortly thereafter, the doctor commits suicide, rattling the priest further. And when he asks for help in all these matters from the priest (Adrien Borel) in the neighboring town of Torcy, he merely implores him to not be so idealistic in his dealings with the people of the town. 

The priest musters up some meager reaffirmation of having "not lost my faith", believing he hears a voice -- perhaps human, likely divine-- calling to him outside his window. Only when he rushes to look out the window and see who the voice belongs to, he is met with silence. It’s a repeated motif that Bresson uses to drive home the priest’s alienation, one of several scenes beginning or ending with the priest alone, looking out of his window into the distance, or otherwise peering through a parishioner's window or standing outside a closed gate. It’s apparent from the opening shot, where the Count shoots a disapproving glare towards the priest (edited in a way that makes it look like the Count simply senses the priest’s presence, as they don’t actually seem to be in the same place) followed by the imagery of the priest trapped behind the bars of a gate, that this is a man who is not welcome in the town.

Despite his ineffectualness and the moments of doubt that creep in on the priest, it’s in his second meeting with the Countess, itself the crux of the film’s narrative, where he makes his first breakthrough. After the priest handles a threat of suicide from Chantal, he is implored to talk to the Countess again in response to her attitude towards her daughter. However, it quickly turns into something altogether different, a battle for her soul, as the Countess explains her torment over the loss of her son. At the key moment of this back and forth, with the Countess implicitly admitting that she hates God, there’s a composition that nicely encompasses Bresson for me. The camera focuses on the priest’s face, pausing for a second, then pushing in a bit, as we can see him processing the emotional response of the Countess, a note of hope showing in his eyes as if he’s been given some kind of transcendent message directly from God. He then utters the words, “You don’t hate him now. Now at last you are face-to-face,” which finally break down the wall the Countess had built. Admitting her willingness to be separated from God, to accept “Thy will be done”, the priest is able to help her once again accept God’s grace.

It’s not only an important scene in terms of the story, it being the one significant change the priest will make in his time at Ambricourt, but it also showcases one of the stylistic choices that Bresson uses so well. The scene begins with the sound of raking leaves, before diving into the spiritual battle between the priest and the Countess. We are pulled in to the otherworldly spiritual aspect of their back-and-forth conversation, when suddenly, at the Countess has resigned her anger, the raking sound appears off-screen again, snapping us back into the “real” world. This happens at several other intervals in the film as well (a gunshot, footsteps) where off-screen sounds break up the inner monologue of the priest, transporting us out of the insular world and back into the natural world.

A few days after this meeting, the priest receives a letter from the Countess in which she reiterates her gratefulness for the Priest drawing her out of her "terrifying solitude" and ending with the words "I'm not resigned. I'm happy. I desire nothing. I had to tell you these things this very evening. We shall never speak of them ever again, shall we? Never. It is good, that word 'never.' I feel it expresses, beyond words, the peace you have given me."

This letter is just one of many written documents during the film that are shown to have great importance, each making clear the power of the written word. The diary goes without saying, as it’s a focal point of the entire film, crystalizing the priest’s internal feelings throughout. The film also ends with a type-written correspondence that wraps up the story, telling of the priest’s own “resignation” (and discovery of grace). Early on there is a letter from Louise imploring the priest to leave the town and later, the priest will burn the spiteful words that are in Chantal’s suicide note, which he all but augurs from her hand in the first place (eliciting the proper response “You must be the devil!”). Finally, here the letter from the Countess not only has a strong, albeit shortly lived, sway over the spiritual state of the priest, but later we find out it also has the power to absolve the priest of the rumors that surround him.

The letter is a glimmer of hope for the priest, but Bresson does not allow the viewer or the priest to dwell on this moment of peace, as we quickly find out that the Countess has died. This death causes the priest’s unrest to come creeping back ("I had said to her, ‘Peace be with you,’ What wonder, that one can give what one doesn't possess!”). Here again Bresson’s framing of this scene exemplifies his stripped down and effective blending of words, sound, and image. From the fade out of the letter being read in the previous scene, we fade in on a clock ticking before panning to the words being written in the diary: "The countess died last night." With the camera staying on those words, we hear the off-screen sound of a candle being blown out and the rush of footsteps as the priest takes off for the Countess's home^**.

Later on, while making a journey through the night woods, the priest falls ill. This provides as good an entry point as any to focus on Leonce-Henri Burel’s cinematography, as he uses some fantastic contrasting black and white imagery in this scene. Bresson asked Burel to keep the images non-exciting and sparse. Although there certainly isn’t anything flashy here, there were more than enough striking compositions available to give me plenty to choose from while capturing screencaps. Also interesting, is that on closer look you notice that there is a certain gauzy sheen that permeates the camerawork throughout. It creeps in on the edges, without the overpowering visuals. At first I thought this was nothing more than the remnants of watching a 60-year old film, but it quickly became obvious that something else was going on. It turns out that on accident, Burel used an improper diffuser on his lens and that when Bresson saw the results, he loved how it looked and asked him to continue doing so, purposefully creating this effect. It’s noticeable, but entirely non-obtrusive, perhaps even subconsciously drawing the viewer more in to the events on-screen, as they a forced to peer slightly closer to the image.

With the priest ill, and now vomiting blood, he decides to head to Lille to see a doctor. He receives a motorcycle ride to the train station from Chantal's cousin, Oliver and it's not until this moment that we see the priest smile for the only time in the film, a moment of joy, of youthful exuberance and simple pleasure, and a chance for a brief bit of introspection during the short ride ("Youth is blessed. It's a risk you take, and even that risk is blessed. By some premonition I can't explain, I understood that God didn't want me to die without knowing something of this risk. Just enough for my sacrifice to be complete when it's time came."). Like his moment of victory with the Countess before, it’s a fleeting joy that comes crashing down very soon after.

After a short discussion with Oliver at the train station (where the priesthood is compared to being a Legionnaire, both soldiers in different armies), we cut to a shot outside the door of the doctor in Lille. Instead of being privy to the conversation that goes on inside the office doors, the next scene begins in the post-visit world of an obviously demoralized priest. It’s at this point that he reveals the diagnosis: “Cancer. Stomach cancer.”  Bresson loves to cut out large swaths of time in-between shots, narrowing his focus to distinct moments. With surgical precision, he will remove a long conversation and replacing it with its after-effects, filling in the blanks with something as simple as the priest’s utterance of those three words. He is pushing the viewer to focus less on the reveal and more on the outcome, as that’s where the depth truly lies.

The priest's final days are spent with an old friend from seminary, an ex-priest named Dufrety who is now a druggist in Lille. Dufrety has run into his own series of issues: dissolute, in poor health, and having spent time in a sanatorium. As his last deed (and his last diary entry), the priest helps to convince Dufrety that it’s not too late to see the priest of Torcy and return to the priesthood. The priest looks out the window one last time, sitting silently, and the scene fades out. Darkness fills the screen for a few seconds more than your typical cut between scenes. When the screen fades back in, we are focused on a type-written letter from Dufrety to the priest of Torcy which explains the priest’s final moments. It’s fitting that Bresson skips an onscreen portrayal of the priest’s death, preferring instead to have it depicted with this letter being read aloud in voiceover, with a backdrop of a cross filling the screen. We find out that near the end the priest asked Dufrety for absolution, which "though neither humanity nor friendship would permit me to refuse, while discharging my duties, I explained to my unfortunate comrade my hesitation at granting his request. He didn't seem to hear me. But a few moments later, he laid his hands on mine while his eyes entreated me to draw closer to him. He then said, very distinctly, if extremely slowly, these exact words: ‘What does it matter? All is grace.’” And with that, the scene fades to black, again lingering on the blackness for a few extra moments.

The priest’s final words have been grounds for some critics to view the ending in a cynical fashion -- that the priest's suffering is for naught as he could not affect the change in had sought and he died, defeated and resigned, receiving his last rites from a lapsed colleague^***. This only seems to work if you entirely reject Bresson’s worldview (which one could be justified in doing) or else ignore the auteurist leanings of Bresson, for surely he was much too interested in the mysteries of the divine to take such a cynical view of the priest’s last moments. More likely, the ending is tragically optimistic, the priest realizing that his trials and suffering, doubts and struggles, the good and the evil he’s seen, they are all irrelevant in this moment. It's only by the grace that surrounds him that he finds comfort and redemption in these final moments, the events of this world matter not. He has found his salvation.

It only took me 3000 words to get to my final thoughts (perhaps I need to take some of Bresson’s rigorous editing style to heart). I think I’ve made it clear that I love the Bresson aesthetic, so I won’t dwell specifically on those aspects. His style of formalism and the obvious progression that has been made over the course of his career to this point has been fascinating. Yet this is the third time in three films that his films have simultaneously stirred me and left me cold (and I now fully expect that going forward with all of his films). To expand on this, even though Diary of a Country Priest doesn’t allow the viewer any emotional catharsis on the surface, the quiet moments throughout and the style in which they are presented make you look inward, piquing the need for introspection, for wanting to look at things deeper. It’s this moment of self-examination that then ends up queuing the feelings that weren’t there initially. Emotion by way of intellect and form. There’s nothing profound in my saying this, but I am fascinated at how Bresson is able to accomplish this so thoroughly.

Fortunately there are real film critics out there that are able to provide much more engaging words on the matter. In this case, Philip Lopate, who gets to the heart of how the film effects the thought process of the viewer in such a perfect way, that I’m excerpting parts of it here to end this piece:

There was a solitary chapel scene, ending in one of those strange short dolly shots that Bresson was so fond of, a movement of almost clumsy longing toward the priest at the altar, as though the camera itself were taking communion. Suddenly I had the impression that the film had stopped, or, rather, that time had stopped. All forward motion was arrested, and I was staring into “eternity.” Now, I am not the kind of person readily given to mystical experiences, but at that moment I had a sensation of delicious temporal freedom. What I “saw” was not a presence, exactly, but a prolongation, a dilation, as though I might step into the image and walk around it at my leisure...

A film like Diary of a Country Priest was not constantly dinning reaction cues into me. With the surrounding darkness acting as a relaxant, its stream of composed images induced a harmony that cleansed and calmed my brain; the plot may have been intimate tragic, but it brought me into a quieter space of serene resignation through the measured unfurling of a story of human suffering...

What Diary of a Country Priest taught me was that certain kinds of movies-those with austere aesthetic means; an unhurried, deliberate pace; tonal consistency; a penchant for long shots as opposed to close-ups; an attention to backgrounds and milieu; a mature acceptance of suffering as fate-allowed me more room for meditation.

_{* Allow me this one digression in an overall serious piece: The hands we see when the journal entries are being written are those of Bresson. Of course, this led me to immediately think of Dario Argento and how he also felt the need to have the hands of his black-gloved killers be his own during POV shots in his films. To keep with this tenuous giallo connection, during several shots in the film a bottle of wine is shown in the foreground with the priest, hinting at his issues with alcohol, leading my mind to the ubiquitous J&B bottles that find their way into every giallo film. [back]}

_{** In connection with the observation about the closed gates/doors before, this is the only moment in the film where all of the doors are open to the priest as he runs to see the Countess, Bresson even focusing on each gate and doorway he runs through on his way to see her. [back]}

_{*** The original script, before Bresson took it over, had the movie end with the line "When you're dead, you're dead" a line that leans much more heavily to the cynical side of things, and one Bernanos wasn't willing to sign off on. [back]}

Labels: diary of a country priest, director retrospective, journal d'un cure de campagne, movie reviews, movies, robert bresson