Andrei Tarkovsky's favorite film
On February 7, 1951, 70 years ago, Robert Bresson's film "Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest)" was released in cinemas in France.
The film is based on the novel of the same name by the French writer Georges Bernanos, published in 1936. By his convictions, Bernanos was a monarchist, nationalist, opponent of the bourgeois system and a zealous Catholic. These views of the writer are reflected in the novel. Died in 1948, two years before Bresson began working on the film, Bernanos was not involved in the script.
In August 1951 "Diary of a Country Priest" took part in the Venice International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the main prize - the Golden Lion. However, the victory was awarded to Akira Kurosawa's film "Rashômon 羅生門". However, just like a number of other festival participants, such as Elia Kazan's "A Streetcar Named Desire" or Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole", Bresson's film was awarded several awards, in particular for Best Cinematography.
"Diary of a Country Priest" has received very high praise from distinguished film critics and filmmakers. For example, Andrei Tarkovsky at one time named 10 of his favorite films, and the first in this short list is Robert Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest".
American film critic guru Roger Ebert rated Bresson's film a maximum of 4 stars and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In a film review, Ebert wrote: "One thing we are sure of is that the "little country priest" takes his vocation and faith very seriously. Nor does the film question them. It is about precisely the dilemma we must all face: How far can our ideas support us in the approach to death? The young priest's ideas prove to sustain him in the final moments, but they did little earlier to console him. He leaves behind a world of cruelty and petty ignorance. He did nothing deserving blame."
The famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev gave the film the maximum possible 10 points and noted in the review: “The tragedy of a rural priest is that no one understands him. People look at him only as a person, not a individuality. Robert Bresson, in his "Diary of a Country Priest", was one of the first to capture the tragedy of human existence in the second half of the twentieth century. Following him, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and the West German "new wave" (first of all - Wim Wenders) developed the topic of noncommunicability."
Despite the complexity of the topic and the film language of Robert Bresson, the average film audience highly appreciated this film. 64% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this movie from 8 to 10.
With that said, FilmGourmand rated Robert Bresson's "Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest)" at 7,914, placing it 845th in the Golden Thousand.
