Not Coming to a Theater Near You
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
“The illusion of health is not health.”
Bresson’s film is beautiful and haunting, all the more so to a secular skeptic to whom it can’t help but suggest a murder mystery without the crime. But that’s just what’s interesting about it: in its own austere way, Diary of a Country Priest echoes The Big Sleep in its story of a tortured outsider who becomes entangled in power struggles within a decadent aristocratic family, gets nothing but guff and repulsion from everyone else, and ends by washing his hands of the situation entirely (although here with more permanent results). Both films express a certain futility to our desire to find out what’s really going on, though in this case it’s the mind – or soul, if you like – of the protagonist itself which is a mystery. (The other characters continually suggest their own red herring explanations: too much wine, not enough beef, the “rotten blood of intellectuals, undernourished since childhood.”) Whatever his intentions, Bresson’s style is the perfect vehicle to embody this enigma of epistemological distance – the way he dollies in on faces at the slightest provocation, as if we could actually get all the way there.
by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
14 Jun 2008 3:37 PM | Submit Comment
