Diary Of A Country Priest Criterion Collection Deals on Coup De Torchon

Diary of a Country Priest - Criterion Collection

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Editorial Reviews

A young priest arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish, but the apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. The fourth film by Robert Bresson (Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne) finds the director beginning to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away all inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue and the music, and exacting a purity of image and sound. The DVD also features an audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie, deleted scenes and the trailer.

Diary of a Country Priest is the first masterpiece by the great Robert Bresson, a towering and slow-working figure in French cinema. Starkly adapted from a successful novel by Georges Bernanos, the film locks in to the mind of a sickly, ineffective young priest trapped in an unfriendly rural area. Bresson charts the priest's collapse with a series of brief scenes, a minimalist style that makes the slightest touch of a hand or far-off sound of a dog barking seem magnified in importance. (This is a movie that must be watched and listened to--it is not a casual experience.) Bresson's luminous portrait of faith and worldly humiliations takes on the intensity of a saint's notebook. In the central role is Claude Laydu, one of Bresson's early experiments with non-actors; his sad, open face is often in close-up, lighting our way into a world of private salvation. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Serious viewing

Reviewed by John J. Casapiedra, 2009-09-07

Diary of a County Priest is not a tale of a failed priest but rather a tale of a dying young priest who felt like a failure. By the end of the movie (and the novel) it becomes apparent that he had a gift for touching people at a very deep level and in doing so leading them away from their self destructive habits and towards religious denouement. His visit to a wealthy married woman locked in self-pity and anger against God for decades due to the death of her young son causes her to let go of all that bitterness and reconcile with God. There were encounters equally revealing. His humbleness enabled him to hold a mirror up to others; some hated what they saw in the mirror and others felt shame. He wasn't derided by the town folk because he was ineffective but because he was effective, only he didn't know it. Very early in the novel he comments to himself "Grace is free but nobody seems to want it." He was aware that people were too caught up in their own selfish habits and bitterness and because of that they denied themselves the Grace which God makes available to those who call to Him. This young priest of Ambricourt saw that Grace was all around and everywhere and that the real problem with so many people was that they refused to acknowledge that fact. His simple beliefs were brought to light with his dying words spoken to a deracinated Catholic friend of his, "Grace is everywhere". Diary of a Country Priest is worthwhile viewing for anybody interested in delving deeply into the intense Catholicity of pre-Vatican II Christendom.

Good effort

Reviewed by Cosmoetica, 2008-09-10

Robert Bresson's 1950 breakthrough film, Diary Of A Country Priest (Journal D'Un Cure De Campagne), is one of those films that is absolutely antithetical to everything a Hollywood film stands for. It is obsessive, detailed, slow, and opaque. This, however, does not mean it is a great film, as so many knee-jerk critics claim it is. It is not; but it is a very interesting film. Ostensibly, it may seem to be a film on religion and/or suffering, or, as film critic Fréderic Bonnard claims, in The Criterion Collection's DVD essay on the film, a film `about imprisonment,' but it's neither, really. It's more cogently a film about masochism, guilt, and pathological privation, although it does touch upon religion, suffering, and imprisonment. The film was not only directed by Bresson (his fourth of thirteen films), but also adapted by Bresson from the 1936 novel of the same title by Georges Bernanos. Anyone familiar with the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer will be familiar with the techniques used by Bresson- although this film is less stagey and more intimate in tone, but Bresson's cinematographer, Léonce-Henry Burel, is not as slow and deliberate as Dreyer, nor does the film depend so heavily on the juxtaposition between light and dark as Dreyer's works do. There is a `lightness' in Bresson's film that is absent from Dreyer's- both in terms of the gauzey and diffused visuals and intellect. This is not to say that Bresson's film lacks depth, it's merely not as dependent upon a grand philosophical posit as Dreyer's films are.... Yet, the film never reaches the heights that other religiously meditative films, such as Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, do, mostly because of the very blandness of the narrative. Whereas Bergman's film transcends religion and cores into universal human behavior, Diary Of A Country Priest merely presents its simple narrative, and if one cannot get into it- for its religious-specific ideas, so be it. Also, the film never gets truly inside the young priest. Why, for example, does he even keep a diary? All it seems to be is a book filled with gossip and his petty and self-serving observations. Yet, the film likens the priest to a Christ-like character, rather than a mere outcast. Since outcasts are universal, why does Bresson decide to affiliate the lead character with the remote Christ and not the ubiquitous nebbish? After all, the priest has no name, and this is clearly done to universalize him, even though a priest, by definition, is a non-universal figure. Not that a Christ complex could not be compelling onscreen, just that this particular one is not, for all this character can muster are vapid apothegms such as, `The desire to pray is already prayer,' "I was a victim of the Holy Agony,' or his dying words, as related by Dufréty: `What does it matter? Everything is grace.'
Were only those words true this film would recapitulate their meaning. Failing that, it at least tries, something that, again, Hollywood films do not even dare. Perhaps that young priest was on to something?

Simplicity like a burning flame

Reviewed by Kerry Walters, 2008-09-03

Bresson's adaptation of Bernanos' novel is one of the most perfect movies ever made. Both Bresson and Bernanos are masters at understatement, and so a story that so easily could've become bloated with easy piety instead becomes a portrait of holiness.

The young cure of Ambricourt (Claude Laydu) finds himself in a parish where everyone mocks or despises him. The local comte dislikes him because the cure knows he's having an affair with his daughter's tutor. The school children mock him because he's youthful and inexperienced. His fellow priests waffle between pity and scorn for what they see as his weakness. And it doesn't help that the cure is plagued by ill health--he eventually dies of stomach cancer--and spiritual dryness.

Yet even in all his suffering and private and public humiliations, and despite his own self-doubts, he exudes a purity born of love that gives him a strength he isn't quite aware he possesses. A perceptive canon tells him at one point that "Your simplicity is like a flame that burns," and this is why, the canon concludes, the cure's parishioners so dislike him. Sanctity is an affront to people whose lives are fractured by bad choices, carelessness, and a refusal to love.

The Cure of Ambricourt's spiritual journey reminds one of Teresa, the "Little Flower," who famously defended the spiritual path of simplicity and smallness. Sainthood isn't necessarily dramatic or flashy. It can also be characterized, as the film's Priest of Torcy says, in "doing little things, day by day, while [one] waits" for God.

Cinematography, directing, and acting are superb. Laydu's performance is as unforced and simple as it had to be to do justice to his character. The robust but not unspiritual priest of Torcy, played by a psychiatrist(Adrien Borel) who had no previous acting experience, is touching. Nicole Ladmiral's portrayal of the troubled adolescent Chantal is heartbreaking. Tragically, Ladmiral's promising career was cut short when she (apparently deliberately) threw herself under a Paris subway car in 1958.

Ten stars.

Smile, God Loves You

Reviewed by Randy Keehn, 2007-09-09

As a country priest myself, I was interested in "Diary of a Country Priest" and I found much to like about the movie. However, I was bothered by the title character's somber approach to his faith, his parishioners and just about everything else. This was a man who seemed to have accepted a "Calling" about the same way others accepted being drafted during the Viet Nam War. I realize that it fits the image of the stern, "nobody better be having any fun" sort of minister that seemed to have been common-place 3-4 generations ago. However, I had a hard time figuring whether the priest was suffering from his stomach pain or his official duties.

There was a defining moment to this movie and I felt it was a pretty powerful extended scene. The theology was relevant and on-the-mark. The movie proceeded from that point in a sort of self-destructing manner and the ending was intentially anti-climatic (depending on your perspective of faith in general).

There was a lot that interested me during the movie and I even used some of it in the sermon the next day. The relationship of priest to parishioner, the need for the priest to be there at the right moments and nowhere to be seen at the wrong moments, the loneliness of the job (for some),etc, were pretty well examined. I couldn't help but be disappointed in how "Diary of a Country Priest" portrayed the priest and his job in such a dismal way. When the priest said, "God is love itself", I wondered at how he could be so right yet seemingly uncomprehending of what he had just said. I'll be watching it again for the many positive things this movie has to offer; depite my complaint, it is a noteworthy film.

A Spiritual tragedy/triumph

Reviewed by Q, 2007-08-12

Bresson's B&W classic tragedy about a country priest and his unsympathetic parishioners. Although it is very dark, there are some incredibly powerful and uplifting moments. Bresson uses voice-over narration as a way of remaining faithful to the diary format of the original book. Anyone with any religious feelings at all will find this profounding moving.