"The Diary of a Country Priest" was Bresson's work in the 1950s, which influenced the New Wave movement that followed. Even in Bergman's film (Winter Light) 10 years later, there are segments in tribute to him, showing the profound influence.
A young priest was sent to serve in a parish in the French countryside. His daily health often made him feel uncomfortable, but the greatest pressure came from the villagers' indifference, bitterness, and doubts about God. The young priest cannot be satisfied with the kind advice of the old priest. He has struggles in his spirit. He is sometimes too weak to pray, but he can help the countess who lost his son find peace at the weakest time. He is lonely. , Isolated, abandoned, and at the same time sought and watched; he refuses to escape and compromise; his truth is that he is a portrayal of Bresson himself.
Bresson tried to think in film, instead of being satisfied with shooting the freshness of the French countryside like his peers. He even cut out all the pictures of the countryside that could be cut out, and replaced it with the protagonist's voice-over. What you hear tells you more than what you see. Bresson told his audience. Don't stop at what your eyes see, that is not enough to get you into a person's heart. Bresson's shooting method is undoubtedly successful. Because when you are tortured to sleepy by those extremely reduced images, you can still feel a powerful force passing from the protagonist to you. As you get used to the images, this force will increase. The stronger, until the end of the film, that kind of power will keep you from letting go for a long time. It makes you have to think, have to chew repeatedly, and have to let your heart calm down.
His struggle said through the priest's mouth, "If I were in your place and I'd broken the oaths of my ordination, I would prefer that it had been for the love of a woman rather than what you call your intellectual evolution. "A word that won my heart. I would rather you give up your beliefs for the sake of women and lust, rather than self-deceiving lies about reason and knowledge.
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