BrandonHabes’s review published on Letterboxd:
Sickness, solitude, and imprisonment.
These are the burdens of a young priest whose community abuses him. They’re also his sacred passions. The more he self-mortifies, the closer he feels to the divine. Bresson’s take on religious asceticism cuts deep. When the priest gets cancer, we ask: Is his cancer the cause of his spiritual malady, or the result of it?
Whatever the answer, the priest’s holy agony is located in his body, a prison he feels he must escape. Freedom, to him, means escaping the prison of flesh and becoming a prisoner of divine will. Where Bresson’s later film A MAN ESCAPED (1956) makes transcendence available on earth, DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST (1951) says transcendence is achieved by escaping the earth. The tensions in these films reveal Bresson’s agnostic wrestle between body and soul, prisoner and prison. I love seeing these two films in dialogue with each other, like two ends of a paradox. Bresson was raised Catholic but lived as an agnostic. He did not believe, but he respected belief. The soul/body conflict he explores in both feels richer for it.
