[It] is only in the last century that heroes like Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel, Yury Zhivago and the priest of Journal d'un Curé de Campagne have regularly emerged. They are from novels in which the hero is an analysable combination of artistic creation, autobiography and public confessional. The task of deciding whether the author is commentating, revealing or committing becomes almost impossible. This is particularly true of Journal d'un Curé de Campagne, written in diary form as a purely first person narrative…. Bernanos has foresaken the advantages of distance for the equally great advantages of intimacy…. The limitations of the structure of the novel reduces its meaning to ambiguities; Bernanos gives us no indication of the way he feels about the priest.

The film provides an ideal solution to this problem. Bresson chose a most unfilmlike form in which the priest reads for long periods out of his diary, whilst on the screen we merely see him writing in the diary or engaged in some task of housework, or sometimes moving towards the next piece of conversation in the film. None of the direct, personal communion between the priest and the audience was lost; yet at the same time we could stand away from the priest observing him in his day-to-day encounters with people…. Bresson has used [the visuals] to reinforce the priest's monologue at all times to provide the atmosphere tone in which the drama is to unfold and to modulate that tone. The relationship between the visuals and the sound track is symptomatic of Bresson's whole approach to the priest's tale. It is the approach of complete simplicity as compared to the relative complexity of Bernanos' priest….

Bresson has used these visual techniques to create the atmosphere of the isolation and disturbance through which his priest is to tell his story. Just as important to note, however, is the way that these visual techniques become part and parcel of the whole change in the nature of the priest's story as it appears in the film. The extreme economy of the visual content with its sparse use of object serves to constantly centre our attention on the drama within the priest. The subjective is made more intense by removing all but the sketched outline of the objective world. Not only are irrelevant objects and lighting removed but the recurrent images of the gate, the cart, and even that of the diary help to create an almost classical unity of place.

As with the visuals, the characters of Bresson's Journal d'un Curé de Campagne become subservient to the central and dominating figure of the priest. In the Bernanos novel the characters, although existing for us only through the eyes of the priest, have an existence of their own. The priest's great virtue is his sympathetic understanding of men. Not only is he the victim of the other characters in the novel, he is also their audience. (p. 80)

[Thus, the characters of the novel] are real complete personalities. Some of them are full of intellectualizations but they are not the mere human manifestations of concepts or points of view; even their intellectualizations have the idiosyncratic qualities of true characters. In the film, however, some characters have been dropped altogether and the others have either been unfocused or focused until they are mere caricatures of the personalities which appear in the book. They are reduced to the stature of catalysts for the dramatic unfolding of the priest's story, agents who fashion the priest's destiny. (p. 81)

The film, then, far from being a synthesized préçis of the novel is more like one of those cut up pictures one sees in psychology text-books—some quirk of Gestalt is necessary before we can realize the whole. That one does see the whole is all to Bresson's credit (the fact that it is Bresson's whole and not Bernanos' is incidental) for few of the conversations which make up the film have not been removed from their context in the larger conversations which occurred in the novel.

The priest of the novel was a complex and many sided creature; poet and philosopher, Catholic and heretic, a man, or rather a youth made up of private doubts and public dogma. To the rest of the clergy he is a nuisance and a bungler, to the non-believing intellectuals he is the essence of spiritualism, and to his parish he is a meddling tiddler. At no stage does he become a 'prisoner of saintly agony'….

The idea that the priest is a 'prisoner of saintly agony' is indispensable to the understanding of the film. To achieve this Bresson has completely altered the spirit of the novel at this point. First he reduces the intensity of the chaos into which the priest is thrown after the death of Mme la Comtesse, and secondly he removes much of the primitive and emotional Catholicism from the Curé de Torcy's visit to the priest which culminates in the Curé de Torcy asking the priest to bless him. In the central scene Bresson presents us with a beautiful low angle close up of the gently crying priest; the quietly shaken monologue reveals him as a 'prisoner of saintly agony' and the shot is sustained for several seconds moving then into a slow fade. There may be music but we are unaware of it.

It is about and around this point that Bresson's film has been made, and the reductions in visual content, in the characters and in the priest himself can all be traced back to Bresson's desire to show us the suffering which is inextricably connected with faith. For Bresson the opposite to faith is nihilism, but Bernanos in not happy to leave the situation at this point. For Bernanos faith itself is nothing without justice; and it is 'justice' which is the raison d'être of the novel. All the major characters are involved in Bernanos' subtle and searching exploration of the place of justice in Catholicism…. It would be gross oversimplification to say that the film is about spiritual suffering and that the novel is about justice, and to leave it at that point. The novel is certainly concerned with spiritual suffering and faith but this theme is entangled amongst many others, and Bernanos is also more concerned with evaluating this spiritual suffering than Bresson; although, as has been said before, the result is ambiguous.

Bresson, then, has entangled the story of spiritual faith and suffering from what was a complex but ultimately unsatisfying novel. His film has stature as a work of art in its own right. But it is no longer sufficient to talk about le Curé de Campagne: one must specify one's priest, for there are two. (p. 82)