Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951)

Journal d’un curé de campagne is a French film first released in 1951, directed by Robert Bresson.  The film is based on a novel by Georges Bernanos and stars Claude Laydu, Jean Riveyre, André Guibert, Rachel Bérendt and Nicole Maurey.  It has also been released under the title: Diary of a Country Priest.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


A young priest arrives in a small village in Normandy 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 who still mourns the death of her infant son to give up her hatred for God.  However, the countess dies a short while later, and her husband suspects the priest of being an evil influence.  The priest’s state of health is misinterpreted as alcoholism by his enemies, who intend to have him replaced.  When the priest’s health worsens, he travels to Lille to consult a doctor.  The news is not good.  He is dying of cancer.

One of the mysteries about cinema is why, alone of all the great arts, it should have almost completely overlooked the one aspect of human experience that has a universal significance - spirituality.  Yes, there have been numerous films based on the stories in the Bible, but these are invariably historical epics (usually showy star-studded blockbusters) intended to entertain rather than to get us to reflect on the meaning of existence.  Of the mere handful of films that have a spiritual dimension, the one that is most effective in getting us to contemplate the metaphysical is arguably Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne, a superlative adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ acclaimed 1936 novel.

Through the experiences of a young country priest, who fights a hopeless battle to bring light to a backwater that would rather wallow in ignorance, the film explores the power and limitations of faith with an extraordinary humanity and lucidity.  The suffering that the priest endures as he plots his solitary and seemingly futile course calls to mind the famous verse from St Matthew’s Gospel:  "Strait is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."  You don’t have to be religiously minded or a believer in the Divine to appreciate this film, to be moved by it and to relate it to your own life.   The film’s message is one that speaks to us all and can be summed up in a line from Hamlet (the wisest thing Shakespeare ever wrote): "To thine own self be true." 

Truth, in an artistic sense, was something that constantly preoccupied Robert Bresson throughout his career.  It is not difficult to equate Bresson, the maverick auteur obsessed with authenticity in filmmaking, with the solitary but driven priest in Journal d’un curé de campagne.  Both are self-made outcasts whose purity and dogged resilience earn them scorn and ever greater isolation from their respective communities.   Indeed, the same headstrong individual crops up in many of Bresson’s subsequent films - most noticeably in Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), Pickpocket (1959) and Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962).  But is it so surprising that the protagonists in Bresson’s films should reflect his own unyielding obsession with truth and his resulting estrangement from the mainstream?  Can any artist avoid reflecting his own likeness in his art?

Certainly, Journal d’un curé de campagne marked a substantial shift from Bresson’s previous films, which included the popular melodrama Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945).  In later years, Bresson would disown these early attempts at filmmaking, presumably because they represented the kind of insipid commercial cinema that he found so soulless and false.  From 1950 onwards, Bresson strove to develop his own style of cinema, employing non-professional actors and a visual style that is marked by a brutal yet subtly lyrical austerity.  An important contributor to Bresson’s liberation from the filmmaking constraints of his time was his first collaboration with the great cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel on Journal d’un curé.  Burel had had a long and distinguished career behind him before he met Bresson, having worked with Abel Gance on his silent masterpieces J’accuse (1919), La Roue (1923) and Napoléon (1927).  It was Burel who suggested using short lenses and fine gauzes to achieve the diffuse, low contrast look that Bresson wanted for his film.  The stark asceticism of Bresson’s subsequent films - which is particularly effective in Un condamné à mort s’est échappé - owes much to the influence of Burel.

Journal d’un curé de campagne was also the first film in which Bresson chose to work with non-professional actors.  Setting a precedent that would be taken up by the directors of the French New Wave, Bresson shunned established actors and insisted on hiring people with no prior acting experience so that he could train them, like puppy dogs, to deliver exactly what he felt the film required.  One of the things that Bresson rejected was histrionic emotionalism, so he would force his actors to repeat their scenes over and over until all trace of emotion had been driven out of their performance.  It was the director’s belief that truth came not from an actor feigning emotion but from the complete absence of emotion.  Claude Laydu, the first of Bresson’s acteurs-modèles, illustrates perfectly this principle.  Whilst Laydu’s face and voice lack expression throughout, the film compels us to identify with him and discern, if not intensely feel, his inner torment.  Laydu would go on to have a fairly conventional career on stage and screen after this film, although his greatest claim to fame is creating the hugely popular children’s programme Bonne nuit les petits for French television, which ran from 1962 to 1973.

This is the film that established Robert Bresson’s international reputation and earned him instant recognition (notably by François Truffaut whilst on the staff of Les Cahiers du cinéma) as one of the most important film auteurs of his generation.  The film garnered several prestigious prizes, including the Prix Louis Delluc in 1950 and the International Award at the 1951 Venice Film Festival.  Today, Journal d’un curé de campagne is considered one of Bresson’s greatest achievements and is probably the best introduction to his work.  The timeless themes that are so skilfully woven into this film - the calvary of the enlightened outsider, the triumph of faith over adversity and the failings of contemporary society - would become central to the director’s subsequent oeuvre and are as characteristic of his art as his uniquely ascetic style of filmmaking.  If truth exists anywhere in cinema it surely resides in the films of Robert Bresson - truth and grace.  How fitting are those last words to Bernanos’ novel and the film it inspired. Tout est grâce...

© James Travers 2011

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