Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
Directed by Robert Bresson
An inexperienced, sickly priest shows up in the rural French community of Ambricourt, where he joins the community's clergy. But the locals don't take kindly to the priest, and his ascetic ways and unsociable demeanor make him an outcast. During Bible studies at the nearby girls school, he is continually mocked by his students. Then his attempt to intervene in a family feud backfires into a scandal. His failures, compounded with his declining health, begin to erode his faith.
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McDonagh, inspired by Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest , blends the bitter melancholy of that film with themes that will resonate with especial force in McDonagh’s native Ireland.
In Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), an obvious inspiration here, a rural community treats a young priest with disdain because he is young, effete and has a high-minded view of religion entirely out of keeping with the grind of their daily lives.
McDonagh himself has described his film as Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” “with a few gags thrown in.”
The picture is mostly structured as a series of snappy conversations Father James has with the members of his parish, who abide him with a bit more humor (but still much of the disdain) expressed by the parishioners in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest .
Taking a conscious step away from the ironic frivolity of The Guard, McDonagh has mentioned Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest as an influence on Calvary .
In fact, McDonagh maintains a tone much more in keeping with Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” or Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Léon Morin, Priest” than the churlish score-settling of “Philomena.”
Agony by agony, Silence imitates the classic films about religious intolerance and spiritual doubt: Father Rodrigues and Father Garupe hide in tall ferns from avenging warlords, evoking Sternberg’s Anatahan (1953); their witnessing of enslavement recollects Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954); their surprise at the Japanese converts’ devotion recalls Borzage’s The Big Fisherman (1959); Rodrigues’s questioning by a devious old samurai (Issey Ogata) is a twist on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951); a recurring Judas figure representing abject mankind brings to mind Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965); an icon of enduring faith references Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987); even Neeson’s appearance unfortunately brings to mind Batman Begins (2005).
And yet the assumption that a film of deep religious feeling has to resemble a long slog is contradicted by the movies, some of which Scorsese references (such as Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest”), that came fully alive onscreen at their moments of greatest spiritual intensity .
What you wonâ??t find in The Passion of the Christ is the formal purity of a film like Bressonâ??s Diary of a Country Priest or the documentary-style lyricism of Pasoliniâ??s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (or, for that matter, last fallâ??s superb The Gospel of John), but rather the color-saturated wide-screen cinematography, â??impactâ?? editing and amped-up digital soundtrack that are the calling cards of the high-end Hollywood studio picture.
Expressions of personal faith account for some of the cinema's very greatest works of art, from Carl Dreyer's Ordet and The Passion of Joan of Arc, to Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest.
The relationship between the two is worthy of the Bresson of Diary of a Country Priest, and far more intense than the simple plot outline of what is only an eighty-minute film.
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You might have to go back to Claude Laydu in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest to see an actor undergoing such exquisite anguish as Will Smith does in Gabriele Muccino’s Seven Pounds.
Following Diary of a Country Priest by five years, A Man Escaped is the director's second film in "the Bresson mode," as well as, at 99 minutes, his second longest, and it requires as much self-acclimation from the viewer as any of his others.
As he did in his previous film, Diary of a Country Priest , Bresson simply puts into visual form the compelling story that already exists on the page, allowing the actions and events to drive the narrative.