The Diary of a Country Priest (no 47)

 

by Allan Fish

(France 1950 120m) DVD1/2

Aka. Journal d’un Curé de Campagne

Is this the way to Ambricourt?

p  Léon Carre  d/w  Robert Bresson  ph  Léonce-Henri Burel  ed  Paulette Robert  m  Jean-Jacques Grünenwald  art  Pierre Charbonnier

Claude Laydu (the priest of Ambricourt), André Guibert (the priest of Torcy), Jean Riveyre (Le Comte), Nicole Ladmiral (Chantal), Nicole Mauray (Louise), Rachel Bérendt (Le Comtesse), Martine Lemaire (Séraphita), Antoine Balpêtré (Dr Delbende), Jean Danet (Olivier), Gaston Séverin (Canon), Jeanne Étéviant (housekeeper), Bernard Hubrenne (priest Dufrety),

I know, awful pun, even mentioning Tony Christie in the same sentence as Robert Bresson.  Yet, this really is the way to Ambricourt and also the way to the first great film of this most singular of minimalist directors.  With this, his third completed feature film, an object lesson in spiritual harmony and understatement, Bresson joined the league of the supreme masters.  It’s a film that of course personifies his fears, philosophies and attitudes in a nutshell, and those who compare it to the works of Bergman, and, especially, Dreyer, are right to do so.  Yet in many ways, their work is poles apart.

            In the thirties, an unnamed priest comes to the remote country village of Ambricourt.  There he is subjected to much indifference, more than a little ridicule and a great deal of apathy.  Yet like many such altruists, he accepts his lot, accepts his parishioners faults, attempting merely to be there for them when they need him.  He eats very little, and when he does he runs the risk of becoming ill.  What he doesn’t realise is that his faith is about to be put to the ultimate test; he’s dying of terminal cancer.

            To say that Bresson, Bergman and Dreyer are soul-mates is somewhat misleading.  Bresson is interested in outsiders, very often one protagonist against the world.  This is sometimes true of Dreyer (whose Joan of Arc underwent a not too dissimilar but much more harrowing test of faith), but rarely of Bergman.  Bresson’s heroes and heroines are truly alone, be they teenage girls, pickpockets, prisoners of war or priests.  Yes, Bresson honoured Dreyer in many ways, not least by making his own Joan of Arc, but one gets the feeling that Dreyer, and perhaps even Bergman, do believe in God.  Bresson was an agnostic, but to these eyes that allows for a fresh insight, a fascination with a faith that the director himself doesn’t share.  It’s a feeling that also permeates Pasolini’s minimalist masterpiece The Gospel According to St Matthew, but is equally exemplified here.  Furthermore there is another difference to Dreyer; that of the actual faith.  His priest is a Catholic, whereas the protagonists of Dreyer and Bergman’s works are staunch protestant puritans (compare say to Dreyer’s Ordet).  Yet Bresson dares to show that his Catholic protagonist can have similar doubts to his protestant cousins in Christ.  His priest’s life is more puritan than Catholic, which may be deliberate in itself.  He’s interested not with individual faiths but with the very notion of faith itself.  That and showing that priests, too, have human urges and can feel real hurt.  As the opening narration tells us, he shows “the simplest and most significant secrets of a life actually lacking any trace of mystery.”  His journal really is a diary worthy of the Grossmiths, as close to a nobody as could be offered. 

            Bresson has often been accused of being overly austere, but such critics are missing the point entirely, this austerity is essential to showing the inner workings of a tortured soul.  His protagonist (marvelously played by 23 year old non-professional Laydu) is an introvert with no inter-social skills at all.  He somehow belongs in such an anonymous village as this, as far removed from the richly characterised villages of Tati and Pagnol as could be offered.  There are scenes here, especially involving the deceptively innocent looking girl Séraphita, and the priest’s final lonely demise, that are almost unbearably moving, all the more so when you consider that the village in question would soon be virtually destroyed in World War II.