Diary of a Country Priest - Criterion Collection

Starring:Claude Laydu, Jean Riveyre, AndrÃ© Guibert, Rachel BÃ©rendt, Nicole Maurey, Nicole Ladmiral, Martine Lemaire, Antoine BalpÃªtrÃ©, Jean Danet, Gaston SÃ©verin, Jeanne Ã‰tiÃ©vant, Bernard Hubrenne, LÃ©on Arvel, Gilberte Terbois, Martial Morange, FranÃ§ois Valorbe, Germaine Stainval
Director: Robert Bresson
Studio: Criterion
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

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

Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Diary of a Country Priest.......2007-06-25

Bresson's exquisite, quietly affecting study of a young priest's spiritual travails remains one of the great achievements of world cinema. Adapted from the novel by George Bernanos, "Priest" is decidedly minimalist in style, with Laydu's supremely restrained performance eliciting our empathy and subtly attuning us to his character's inner struggles. Bresson handles the details brilliantly, his unadorned elegance and intensity permeating the mood, set design, and action. "Priest" is a sublime film that will reward attentive viewers with a profound meditation on life, faith, and purpose.

Torment City.......2007-06-24

If you enjoy spending nearly two hours watching a poor, sickly young priest being verbally abused by some of the nastiest people in the world, this film is for you. The entertainment value is zero--unless you're into torment. The "fillum" students, of course, will groove on the angst, seeing all sorts of deeper meanings. Normal people would be wiser to watch baseball or the Stooges.

EXCELLENT REISSUE BY CRITERION OF THIS ESSENTIAL VIEWING FOR ANY CATHOLIC OR ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING.......2007-03-30

Certainly the novel by Georges Bernanos entitled Journal d'un cure de campagne created its alarm in its day as it exposed some of the less spiritual and more secular realities of society, and yet it is a deeply insightful and still troubling examination of a young priest struggling to live with spiritual authenticity his difficult vocation as a diocesan priest in a strange cold town while slowly dying of stomach cancer.

Fortunately Bernanos portrays this priest as a gifted and careful writer who maintains an intimate diary. Therefore this novel, in the old style of Liaisons Dangerueses, presents its narrative in the guise of discovered records now published. It is therefore impossible to film.

Yet Bresson does so admirably and faithfully and sincerely, and with great talent, technique and wisdom. Thankfully the great Criterion offers us a wonderful reprint restored very recently by which we may view again and again this wonderful, subtle, moving film. My only choking point of course are the subtitles which go invisible against a white background and appear so intrusively against the black background of the young asthetic priest's pre-Vatican cassock, but then the French for the most part is spoken so slowly and carefully that we can follow the original with practice, which is always for the best in any case. It is also accompanied by the priest clearly chronicling in his journal the words we hear repeated, as we watch him write across the big screen, and thus this film from the start graciously supplies its own subtitles in the original.

One great advanatge of this Criterion edition is the brilliant commentary. For once this is helpful, unlike for example the ubiquitous Mr. Carpenter in similar overdubbed commentaries, where the speaker mumbles like someone who believes they know much and actually parrot inanities which make you want to reach forward to the cinema seat before you and shyly demand their silence. Here the optional commentary as said before is brilliant, helpful, gracious, utterly informative and thought provoking, including when the nephew of the Count speaks of his fleeing for the Foreign Legion and the commentator draws a parallel explicitly to the current rush to war in Iraq with the grotesquely heretical hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers!"

Every Catholic should see this film to remember life before the Second Vatican Council, in the time between the two wars, and the loneliness of our parish priets in their spiritual struggle as quasi-hermits in the wilderness. It is a delight to see the old vestments, kissed at the embrodiered cross, and to hear the Latin blessing with proper gestures. It is interesting to see the villagers's presuming our contemporary infamous evil in the priest's regard for the little girls he prepares for First Holy Communion.

The commentator again provides useful information regarding the actor's preparation for this role. Yet as with any commentary no matter how excellent, we can neer take it as the last word. Indeed, we may read the young dying priest as archetype for the death of a way of life in the light of coming technological wonders and a new way of life. In another century he would have died alone slowly like a dog, as portrayed here, offering up his suffering and physical pain. Then we see him crossing the huge new train station in Lille struck by wonder and revelation as if in a modern secular cathedral. Surely this epiphany opens us to a jungian reading. It must at least bring us to reach for this amazon's access to old copies of Bernanos and associated commentaries as cited by Critierion's delightfully informative commentator.

Truly this is a film which merits a place in your DVD and/or theological library. More than five stars.

If You Like Ingmar Bergman's Films.......2007-03-12

Robert Bresson is not a widely known film-maker like Ingmar Bergman.
I started collecting his films after seeing this film.
I rate him one of the master film-makers like the aforementioned auteur, M. Antonioni, L.Malle, J. Renoir, L. Viconti & A. Kurosawa.

Wanting to believe, but lacking faith.......2006-10-07

This film by Robert Bresson is beautiful and sad. Made in the same ambience and tone as his 'Au Hazard Bathasar' but not as exciting as it. I don't know where you are coming from, but if you are interested in intimistic and basically plotless cinema, as can be found in foreign (and old) movies, Bresson is a good choice. But if your reason is that of making a spiritual journey, or or widening your faith, then, you must be warned.

'Diary...' is pure doubt. The doubt of the main character, the rural priest, and the doubt of the director. The tone and the sadness of the experience of watchibng this film is what mostly impresses me. Other than that, what stays in my mind at the end of the story are the following thoughts:

a) The story-teller (Bresson) makes us reflect on the inutily of believing in God, or in acting as if God exists, for if He does exist, life in the present, my circumstance, reality, now, what I feel, the cancer I suffer, the the pain I feel, is so real, so more real than that God of Love I want to believe in but I doubt. This is the impression that this film is communicating me.

b) Everybody is cruel. This people don't even deserve my love for them. How can I love them. Why should I be different? It would be crazy. What would my argument be sustained on (the case of the young priest) in order to prove these people wrong in their believes and in their actions? God, his mercy and love? They look at me and they despise me! Or they pity me like a fool!

Sad. So this is not really a story, it is just a depiction of a tormented soul, of the realization that we are so imperfect, so weak (would Bresson even say "sinful"?), a fool-on-the-moon's lament. A cry in the wasteland.

What do you do when you are hungry? Do you eat the food, or do you cry at it and blame it for being hungry? Same with God.

There is a certain resemblance between this film and the way the great historian Arnold Toynbee depicts disintegrating societies: There is a sense of drift, in which people yield to a meaningless determinism, as if their efforts do not matter, and as if they have no control over their lives. There is a sense of guilt, a self-loathing that comes from their moral abandon.

Drift and guilt. These nouns apply as well to the young priest's parishioners. The whole postmodern pandemonium.

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