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> Arts & Faith -> Film / Movies / Cinema -> The Top100 -> The Top100 (2004)
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Le Journal D'un Curé De Campagne ("Diary of a Country Priest")
(1951)
Directed by Robert Bresson, written by Robert Bresson (from a novel by Georges Bernanos)
Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is one of the most
deeply Catholic films I’ve ever seen. Faithfully adapting its source
material, Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos’s fictional autobiography
of a soul, the film profoundly contemplates the spiritual meaning of suffering
and persecution, conversion and incorrigibility, and the dark night of the
soul with a rigor and insight evocative of Augustine’s Confessions
or Thérèse’s Story of a Soul. The story is simple. A sensitive, frail young priest (Claude Laylu) arrives
in a rural parish in spiritual decline. Vulnerable in his inexperience, he
meets with indifference, polite toleration, even open mockery. An older, experienced
priest from a neighboring parish, a worldly but not unspiritual man, gives
him advice that is striking both for its practicality and its cynicism: “Keep
order all day long, knowing full well disorder will win out tomorrow.”
Click here
to read the full review by Steven D. Greydanus on Decent Films Additional
resources for this entry:
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