To-Watch List (2018 Edition) Film 29 of 115

I don’t like going to Church. Sure, as a kid it was mainly due to the inconvenience of it, having to remove myself for an hour out of a precious weekend to go to Mass. Later, I felt like I didn’t believe in God—at least I didn’t want to believe in the omnipotent Father figure for whom “mercurial” was an understatement. Later, though, my beliefs changed into something less reactionary. It’s not that I didn’t believe in God or lacked a patience for ritual—I just didn’t agree with the idea of organized religion. Growing up, I felt that a person’s connection to God—my connection to God—was their own deeply personal matter. That prayers were only meant for those who were supposed to hear them, and the rituals associated to them were developed over time, and not bound by millennia of ritual or sacrament. Which is why I tend to not talk too much about religion in public. Everyone has their own way of seeking spiritual connection and fulfillment—and for me, to make a show of it once a week feels overly theatrical and hypocritical.

Oddly enough, though, it’s this belief in a unique individualized connection to God that draws me into the depiction of religion in film. Exploring a protagonist’s faith and the trials they endure to protect it is one of the most universal struggles one can depict in storytelling. While everyone has their own method of worship, we are empathetically united in that underlying search for belief and meaning.

With A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, and now Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson has explored the connections and contradictions between belief and action, his characters engaging in the rituals of life while searching for that greater spiritual fulfillment. Just as ritualistic is how these films’ protagonists engage in their own form of scripture, with each man documenting their experiences as they happened. In the moment, these diaries may be written only in service of the author, as if to get their story straight, seeking existential clarity in the events of their day. But they’re also for us—an audience the characters will never interact with, and one that can immediately detect any contradictions between the events themselves and the recollection that narrates and recontextualizes them. More so with Diary of a Country Priest than any of his films I’ve seen so far, Bresson uses the insights into the suffering of one man to explore the mystery of faith—its uses, its shortcomings, its flaws—and how faith remains a crucial part (if not the most crucial thing of all) of one’s identity.

Without a name given in the film, the Priest of Ambricourt is instead defined by three things: his profession, his pain, and—most importantly—his words. His life is constant suffering, plagued by a stomach ailment he half-heartedly treats. His profession seems of little use to those around him, scorned by everyone in his parish and urged to leave by anonymous letters—not to mention his increasingly wavering faith. Rather than let himself be solely defined by constant suffering or his growing irrelevance to the people he cares about, though, the Priest dedicates himself to action. His purpose: to convince others to believe in God, and to memorialize his days, as insignificant as they may be. His words may inspire change—in others and within himself.

His efforts, though, are marked with failure. His pain grows, his attempts to convert others either fall on deaf ears or are met with the sudden death of his converts. The Priest’s own Diary bear constant revisions, showing a gap between his experiences and his ability to recount them. Likewise, there’s an equal gap between his intentions, his actions, and the amount of change he’s able to cause. Does God exist if there is constant suffering? What’s the use of compassion if it doesn’t inspire change? What’s the use of documenting your existence, proving we made an effort, if what’s captured isn’t truth, but feeble hope? If, to the Priest, identity is measured in the amount of change we cause in the world, who are we if every effort ends in disaster?

There are plenty of films that interrogate a system of belief, done so from a comfortable position of the writers/directors thinking they’ve come up with an adequate answer. But few films rarely shed the battle armor of presupposed belief and ask these questions with such earnestness, to admit they haven’t known the answers—and still don’t. Films like these acknowledge the mystery of faith as ever thus, refusing to tie a bow around the mysteries of the world to keep us in a state of contented ignorance. They acknowledge the random, brutal suffering we can experience through life—and count it among one of the miracles of life. In Diary of a Country Priest, there is suffering because a lack of it is dishonest; change is scorned because it’s more comforting to remain within our beliefs; and there will forever be a gap between what we hope to achieve and what is done—because in between is precisely where faith exists and where it’s needed most.

The events of Diary of a Country Priest do not show the inefficacy of faith, but the precise reasons why faith is absolutely vital. There are moments of such grace in the film—the Countess’ gradual loosening of her hatred towards God; the Motorcycle ride that provides the Priest’s last amusement, as well as a glimpse of a friendship that could have been but never will be; Seraphita helping the Priest out of the mud in secret, revealing the compassion that hid beneath conformed hatred. All moments that attempt to show that persistence of faith may have some lasting consequence in the world.

Bresson and his film don’t try to make these moments end-all-be-all moments of change—the Priest continues to suffer, and even the last shot of him in the film is a tableau of agonizing passion and doubt. However, there’s that paradoxical final moment, delivered in the film’s only shift in perspective—in detailing the Priest’s final moments, he appears to have convinced others of an apparently-restored faith: “What does it matter? All is grace.”

Between the depiction of doubt and a description of certainty lies a mysterious amount of faith—a faith that we’re asked, but not demanded, to believe in.

It may take me a while to fully articulate why this moved me the most about Diary of a Country Priest. But I think it’s because it’s one of the first times that a film encouraged me to still have my doubts, but hoped that it could inspire change. It doesn’t sanctify its characters, nor does it doesn’t speak from preordained belief or come to a conclusion rooted in religious hegemony. Diary of a Country Priest speaks to that deeply personal connection to whatever higher power one chooses to believe in, and fights tooth and nail to preserve it.

This is what the Priest’s identity is finally rooted in—not in these moments of suffering or relief, not in the positions we take in the lives of others, and not in what is immortalized in the stroke of a pen. Who we are is rooted in what is in between, in what cannot be defined by others—rather, it’s in how we choose to define ourselves.

“Keep order all day long, knowing full well disorder will win out tomorrow, because in this sorry world, the night undoes the work of the day.”