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Robert Bresson: Country Priest
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Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar is one of the great, heartbreaking achievements of cinema. In a career of memorable humanist masterpieces like Diary of a Country Priest (1950), Pickpocket (1955), and L’Argent (1983), Au hasard Balthazar is Bresson’s greatest achievement. It’s a film that takes an endearingly simple premise that, in the hands of another filmmaker, could have been a sentimental disaster and turns it into a deeply felt fable about the pitfalls of human cruelty, which Bresson sees as the unfortunate essence of human nature.
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Born in central France and educated in Paris, Bresson’s early ambition was to be a painter. He ventured into filmmaking with the short Les Affaires publiques (1934), a satire with nods to Clair and Vigo, which was rediscovered in the 1980s after being thought lost. After a year or so as a prisoner-of-war he was approached by a Paris priest with a proposal for a film about the Bethany order of nuns, which became Les Anges du péché (1943). His next feature was ... made during the Occupation, and filmmaking had by then definitely supplanted painting. The confusion over his date of birth, symbolic perhaps of his reclusive nature, caused reviewers of his final film L’Argent (1983) to marvel over how a man “in his late 70s” or alternatively “in his 80s” could show such youthful exuberance in his filmmaking.
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Bresson contemplated resuming his Genesis project and ... sketched out plans for several other films, but eventually ill health overtook him. His first marriage had ended in divorce, but his second wife, Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch, whom he married in the early 1990s, cared for him and tended his legacy. For much of the later part of his life, Bresson lived in an apartment on the top floor of a historic 17th-century building in Paris - a fitting roost, perhaps, for a man who had towered over the world of French cinema and seemed to touch the country's most profound artistic traditions in his work. He died in Droue-sur-Drouette, near Paris, on December 18, 1999, after a lingering illness.
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Diary of a Country Priest seems, on the surface, like Bresson's least accessible film. His other films at least sound interesting. A Man Escaped is a suspenseful story of a prison break. Pickpocket shows the meticulous lifestyle of a criminal. Lancelot du Lac is an updating of the Holy Grail story, complete with bloody swordfights. Au Hasard Balthazar is about a donkey who experiences the seven deadly sins.
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Les Dames is ... back in circulation having been released in the US by Criterion, though without the full-scale production of its other Bresson title. There is no commentary track, or any additional documentary material on the disc. The sleeve notes also make the claim about removing thousands of scratches. Maybe it’s just a standard company boast as the transfer has clearly been made from less-than-perfect material and the end result has nowhere near the clarity and sharpness of Diary of a Country Priest. Notwithstanding, its release fills in a major hole in the availability and knowledge of Bresson’s work and the sleeve notes, essays by François Truffaut and David Thomson, are exemplary. In Truffaut’s case, it’s interesting that he too should seek to trace the film’s literary origins and compare the adaptation that Bresson has made from the play by Jean Girardoux.
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The dimensions of that breakthrough became clear with Bresson's third postwar film, 1951's Le journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest). Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, this stark tale of a self-sacrificing young priest who ministers to his flock even as he himself is dying concludes with an image of a gray cross on the screen. The film set the tone of quiet seriousness that would recur in most of Bresson's mature works. It was ... defined by the director's fervent Catholicism. While not all of Bresson's works have religious themes, they often dealt with questions of faith or morality. The contrast between timeless themes and modern, stripped-down cinematic language accounts for some of the power of Bresson's work.
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Country Priest