Monthly Archives: May 2015

  • Diary of a Country Priest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • The American

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anton Corbijn (2010)

    ‘You’re acting strangely’, says the prostitute Clara to Jack, the eponymous American, as he gets up from their bed and dresses, ‘as if you were thinking about something …’  Clara describes George Clooney’s performance as Jack very well.  There must be a clause in Clooney’s contract with the cinema audiences of the world which entitles him, every so often, to play someone who never smiles.  Watching him on occasions like this is both frustrating and like an extended version of the yes/no interlude on Take Your Pick:  will Clooney lose concentration and allow his face to crack?  Occasionally, during the first hour of The American, a smile seems to threaten but he keeps it in.  When Clooney plays superficially superficial men (as in Up in the Air), he’s brilliant:  he’s peerless in empathising with a shallow charmer and revealing him to be more complex than you expected.  When he plays someone serious on the surface (in Michael Clayton and here) he’s inexpressive without suggesting hidden depths.  Jack is a professional arms maker and international assassin, hiding out, for most of the film, in a small town called Castelvecchio in the mountains of Abruzzo.  Jack’s coming to the end of his career and apparently regrets every moment of it.  (One of the few affecting elements of Clooney’s portrait is the fact that, although he’s still in excellent shape in his fiftieth year, he’s nevertheless showing his age.)  But to reinforce the poker face, he’s removed every bit of warmth from his voice to speak Jack’s lines – he sounds abrupt and toneless.  Clara is spot on:  Clooney acts as if he’s thinking about something – he appears to have a lot on his mind but you never discover what.    Clara, needless to say, is no ordinary prostitute and Jack finds himself developing feelings for her.  They go out to dinner at a local restaurant and, with a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in his hand, he grins.   The difference it makes to Clooney’s expressivity is startling (an actor and director as acute as he is must be aware of this):  once he’s flashed the smile he’s able to register Jack’s spiritual bankruptcy in a way he couldn’t before.   Then the shutters come down again.

    The American has a screenplay by Rowan Joffe, adapted from a novel of 1990, A Very Private Gentleman, by the British writer Martin Booth (who died in 2004).    The main character in the book was British too and you naturally wonder about the significance of his being made American in the film.  Is Jack’s nationality symbolic?  Is an American of today someone who’s practised in a role he no longer believes in?  The explanation is probably simply that Clooney got involved in the project but the film’s title is shallowly thought-provoking, like the butterfly that Jack (‘Signor Farfalla’ as Clara calls him) has tattooed between his shoulder blades.   Nick James’ piece on The American in this month’s Sight and Sound illustrates how much pleasure film lovers like him (unlike me) can get purely from spotting references to other movies.  Anton Corbijn too seems pretty comfortable with this kind of approach.  The American looks expensive, moves slowly, is proficiently made and up itself.  Its subject seems to be making a film of the kind that it is.  You’re struck that things have never been quite the same for this genre since the Cold War ended (when Jack phones an associate and reports what ‘the Swedes’ are doing the effect is comically bathetic).  Even I could see The American was meant to evoke the heyday of this kind of story:  the sequences of Jack making weapons recall The Day of the Jackal – and the climax to the action, which takes place during a religious procession, echoes the Liberation Day episode in Jackal.  (The interaction between what’s happening in the foreground and background is feeble here compared with the Zinnemann film – let alone with what Coppola makes happen during the saint’s day procession in Godfather II, which Corbijn also brings to mind.)  Other reminders of the way they used to make secret agent stories are the quantities of naked female flesh on show (mainly Violante Placido as Clara, also Irina Bjorklund in her brief appearance as another of Jack’s girlfriends).   In case we thought Jack and Clara were going to live happily ever after, the ending is a kind of twist on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (one of the few Bond films I’ve enjoyed).   And there are resonances with protagonists in more recent movies played by Clooney’s friend Matt Damon – Jason Bourne of course and Tom Ripley.  ‘Tu Vuo Fa’ L’Americano’, performed by Jude Law to the Damon character’s delight in The Talented Mr Ripley, is heard on a radio here.   (Damon is probably better equipped to incarnate an elusive or anonymous figure:  Clooney isn’t naturally well cast as someone you don’t notice.)  With Thekla Reuten as a hit woman, Paolo Bonacelli as a dodgy priest (the faux-Catholic exchanges between him and Jack may be the worst bits of writing in The American because they’re the only purplish ones) and Filippo Timi, magnetic in the minor role of the priest’s illegimitate son.   The skilful pastiche score is by Herbert Gronemeyer and the elegant photography by Martin Ruhe.

    5 December 2010

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