Diary of a Country Priest (1951) Review
The young sickly priest suffering: the cross, the cross
The penitence of a country priest in a small village. The awfulness of common people, the travails of the good. Does the priest know what he’s doing? He appears to be willingly walking towards self-destruction, or: Passion. Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne, 1951) is a tour de force on Christian ethics. The Greeks promised happiness (or flourishing) to those who lived according to the Good, but Christianity promises only the cross: suffering, suffering, unending suffering in this valley of tears. And so Jesus never laughs in the Gospels, and neither does the sickly priest played by Claude Laydu in this devastating film, the closest cinema ever came to Dostoevsky.
The priest suffers and suffers in his rigid attempt to follow Christ’s example, inevitably confronted by the townsfolk’s incomprehensible cruelty. True Christianity is incompatible with human life and that’s its appeal: the challenge it presents, the recurrent and increasing self-imposed moral demands, the call to persuasion, justification, self-control. To be master of oneself and, as a consequence, of the world in a sort of spiritual conquest: conserve one’s soul in order to gain the world.
Of course, that’s impossible: hell is other people, as Sartre said, and as the priest finds out. The film works with moral types, not characters: the actors are merely automata for ideas. There’s an older priest, very orderly, with a practical vision of the church’s role: bring political order, spiritual solace and some material respite to meaningless suffering, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. And perhaps have some good wine along the way, since he’s French. He’s lost the religious zeal and the fervor for ideas typical of the young. Jesus was a rather young man, his radicalness perhaps stemmed from not knowing enough about people. An older Jesus, perhaps, would have conceded some ground and accepted, like this older priest, a more pragmatic notion of Christianity: parish management.
Then there’s a diabolical, enfant terrible daughter who wishes the worst to her parents. Her mother, who commits suicide eventually, absolutely grieved and tormented, is spiteful of God due to her son’s untimely death. She hates God and everything else, and is entirely egotistic in her approach to life. After a conversation with the young priest she hangs herself, apparently in peace. What do you do with a person like that? Just like the priest, we are aghast and troubled. Why should she be judged? Why, still, do we hold so fast to Christianity’s absolute valuing of life given how horrible it is? Why such resistance to accepting, as, for instance, the stoics did, that suicide is not “sinful”, but might be quite honored? Again, that’s part of that enticing challenge of Christian faith: providing increasingly elaborate answers and justifications for harsh problems felt in the gut.
As is often the case in tales which confront the crux of Christian ethics with the moral realities of modernity, there’s also a scientific-oriented, materialist type in Diary of a Country Priest: a resilient doctor of sorrowful eyes, another sufferer. His motto: Face up to it. He’s an equal to the sickly priest, only they’ve chosen different paths, which, however, will take them the same way. We’re all going the same way, but necessarily alone.
The doctor dies, another suicide. The priest dies too, stomach cancer. They all die eventually, when not physically, spiritually. As the film grows bleaker towards the end, its message becomes crystalline in Bresson’s dry style: we’re dead already, lost and solitary cadavers in this lonesome valley. There’s no way out of bleakness and despair. This is the truth, this is life –– the Via Crucis: to bear one’s cross alone towards sacrifice. That’s Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, definitely not a good pick for a family movie night.
