Diary of a Country Priest
Journal d’un curé de campagne
Robert Bresson (1951)
Philip Kemp’s introduction in NFT1 caused audience reaction like I’ve never heard at BFI before, with people voicing their annoyance that he was telling us too much about the themes and the story (and others, even more vociferous, telling them to shut up and ‘show some respect’). I had mixed feelings about this. Journal was being shown as part of the ‘Passport to Cinema’ season designed chiefly for students of the National Film and Television School and both the BFI’s monthly programme booklet and the handout for the film made clear that there would be an introduction. On the other hand, it’s typical of hopeless BFI organisation that their guest speaker presumably hadn’t been told that the handout also carried the usual ‘spoiler warning’. The hapless Kemp was at first inaudible, then discursive, then – after the audience participation – more or less bullied into a rushed, lame ending to his intro.
Once the film began, I found it continuously difficult to concentrate – well beyond the standard slumber during the first few minutes of a BFI evening – and there’s no point denying that I was relieved when it was over. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it (and I was aware of that even when I was fighting to stay awake). Robert Bresson – with Claude Laydu, the (at the time) non-professional who plays the unnamed young priest of the title – provides, in this adaptation of the Bernanos novel, sustained insights into the workings of a religious sensibility. He illustrates and communicates how that sensibility causes the priest to experience the world – and what he believes to be God’s presence in his existence.
We know from his voiceover what the priest’s inner thoughts are – and that they’re mostly miserable – but Laydu’s face expresses those thoughts with extraordinary power, in a way which seems to illustrate, in the priest’s few moments of optimism and sense of connection with his God, the operation and transfiguring effect of grace. (The priest’s dying words are ‘What does it matter? All is grace’.) The other characters don’t seem to perceive what we in the audience can see in the priest and, compared with Laydu’s work, the playing of some of them is conventional or melodramatic. As screen presences, they are salient but disconnected from the priest. The effect is to make them seem less like human beings than like incarnations of states of minds or – in the priest’s view of things – souls. Diary of a Country Priest dramatises psychic experience – the life of a turbulent mind that veers between feeling close to and completely separated from God. What’s perhaps most remarkable about the film is that this mental agitation really does seem to occur in a type of time that’s different from linear time. You don’t need to have had religious experience of this kind – or to have religious belief – in order to be impressed by what Bresson achieves.
The young priest who, at the start of the film, arrives in Ambricourt, his new parish, is, for the most part, separated from the physical landscape in which he exists. There are sounds of local life going on around him but they are distanced from, peripheral to his being. The window frames through which he’s sometimes shown, the twisting branches of winter trees, which look to be constraining and confounding him – these too seem to express a spiritual condition. The images are predominantly tenebrous and, when there are outbreaks of light, it’s not a comforting light – it’s harshly, demandingly bright. Philip Kemp, responding to the audience complaints about giving away the plot, pointed out that we learn that the priest is ill within a very few minutes of the start of this 110-minute film. (He subsists on a diet of bread and poor wine – and it transpires that he has inherited alcoholic poisoning: according to the BFI handout, the disease was widespread in rural France in the first half of the twentieth century.) It’s much later in the picture that we – and the priest – learn that he has stomach cancer. The nature of his terminal illness may sound symbolically pat – a malign inner force that’s gnawing away at him – but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re watching the film. One reason for this is that Bresson leaves unresolved the question of what is eating the priest: the spiritual life or the viciousness of the material world or the interaction of the two.
The sequence in which the priest rides as a passenger on a motor bike to the local station, and the conversation that ensues there, is, within the scheme of the film, unusual and really stands out. It’s Olivier – the son of the aristocratic family at the heart of the priest’s rigorous relationship with the Ambricourt community – who gives the priest a lift. Riding pillion, his arms round Olivier’s waist and his cassock flapping in the breeze, the priest is briefly in the world of physical sensation and normal human contact. When they talk at the station, Olivier says he would have liked to be the priest’s friend and it’s a poignant moment: it suggests to the priest the possibilities of life as a man of the world rather than a man of God. The priest is leaving Ambricourt to visit a doctor, to learn that he has cancer.
With Jean Ganet as Olivier; André Borel (excellent) as the intelligently worldly senior priest who advises the young man; Jean Riveyre and Rachel Bérendt as the Count and Countess; Nicole Ladmiral as their doomed daughter Chantal. The impressive score is by Jean-Jacques Grunenwald; the fine cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel. Bresson himself wrote the screenplay.
27 April 2009