I remember first watching this when I was a university student and finding it quite tedious, then a few years a later completely reversed my opinion of it with a fine new celluloid print in a cinema, and as such I believe it is a film that ages well with its audience. After Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, it finds Bresson coming into his own in terms of the way he choreographs his actors, while still holding a little of that melodramatic form of his previous two features. It’s held together by a central performance by Claude Laydu recalling Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc a little — the intensity of suffering, held in the eyes. Indeed, Laydu generally moves across the whole gamut of emotions from merely apprehensive through melancholy, baleful, anguished, pained and tormented. One of these tormentors is a Mouchette-like young girl, and another is also a young woman, though perhaps it’s his own self-doubts that torment him the most. Even as the film moves towards an ending that reminds me of Ikiru (the film before it in the Criterion Collection), it’s the grace in which Laydu holds himself — and which Bresson’s filmmaking captures, in beautiful, ethereal and softly contrasted black-and-white — that most marks out our country priest, and which lend him and the film a touch of the divine.
FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Robert Bresson (based on the novel by Georges Bernanos); Cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel; Starring Claude Laydu; Length 115 minutes.
Seen at Te Papa, Wellington, Saturday 16 June 2001 (also earlier on VHS in the university library, Wellington, August 1998, and most recently on DVD at a friend’s home, London, Sunday 22 July 2018).
filmcentric 