DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST Movie Review

Le Journal d'un Cure de Campagne

Just see it. Describing director Robert Bresson's masterpiece is inevitably to trivialize it; it's an experience that was conceived for and can only be experienced as cinema. The story is simple. A priest, dying of cancer, is in a state of despair because he believes that he has failed in his life's task of raising the moral level of his parish. As he examines his life mercilessly, the priest ultimately is able to contemplate the possibility and meaning of redemption, and this is conveyed by the director with such subtle and eloquent imagery that the film itself becomes a kind of answer to the largest of all questions. Diary of a Country Priest is an example not only of the cinema's great, largely untapped powers, but also an irrefutable answer to those who question the relevance of art to everyday life. One of the greatest films of all time.

NEXT STOP … A Condemned Man Has Escaped, Mouchette, Pickpocket

1950 120m/B FR Nicole Maurey, Antonine Balpetre, Claude Layou, Jean Riveyre, Nicole Ladmiral; D: Robert Bresson; W: Robert Bresson; C: L.H. Burel; M: Jean Jacques Grunenwald. VHS DVT, IGP, FCT