Summary
A young priest arrives in a small village in Northern France to take on his first parish.
Although he performs the duties of a priest with diligence and humility, he remains an
outsider, shunned and even reviled by his neighbours. His feeling of isolation
and apparent inability to improve things bring on a depression that puts his faith to
the test. Worse, he is suffering from an illness which compels him to live on a
meagre diet of bread and wine, and his fear of dying places a greater strain on his faith.
He manages to achieve some good, by persuading a countess to give up her hatred for God.
However, the countess dies a short while after, and her husband suspects the priest of
being an evil influence. The priest’s state of health is misinterpreted as dipsomania
by his enemies, who intend to have him replaced. When the priest’s health worsens,
he journeys to town to consult a doctor. The news is not good. He is dying
of cancer.
Review
In his film adaptation of Bernanos’s tragic novel, Robert Bresson paints a deeply moving
picture of the triumph of faith over worldly suffering and the worst in human nature.
As the young priest writes his diary, we see the world through his eyes – the cynicism,
the hypocrisy, the injustice, the pain. As he struggles to contain his illness,
his genuinely sincere attempts to minister to his parishioners are rejected and he is
humiliated. He knows he is dying, but he still clings to his faith, hoping that
he might survive, that all might be well. He has a taste of youth when he accepts
a ride on a motorbike – but that pleasure is lived for but a brief moment. A great
moment of tragic irony.
As in his magnificent Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc and Au hasard, Balthasar
, Bresson is painting the portrait of a saint, with apparently simple but highly effective
brushstrokes. It is a very austere view of religious experience, almost to the point
of devaluing completely this physical life. The priest’s destiny, Bresson tells
us, is to be rejected, shunned and suspected, to live a life of poverty and solitude,
scarcely able to eat, periodically coughing up blood and fainting. Nature’s victim
is mankind’s outcast. The cross which the young priest bears seems far greater than
that of Jesus Christ, but his faith, his only source of strength, is all too weak.
The religious allegory is hardly subtle, but it is, all the same, very moving and memorable.
No director has ever been this successful at conveying to a cinema audience the sense
of religious experience without succumbing to phoney sentimentality.
Bresson uses his simple film-making techniques to great effect. The remoteness of
the location reinforces the priest’s isolation, as does the constantly recurring metaphor
of the glass window to divide the priest from his parishioners. The priest
is played very ably by Claude Laydu. The actor’s lack of professional training gives
his performance an air of genuineness, greatly accentuating the emotional impact of the
priest’s suffering.
This is a great film which offers a unique and uncompromising view of human nature.
© James Travers 2000
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