It is easy to see why Bresson has rejected conventional 'realism' [in Le Journal d'un Curé de Campagne]—which, in effect, means that the director has to record many inessential and superficial feelings, whims and fluctuations in his characters' experiences. But a man's soul is more sullen, mysterious, withdrawn. In Bresson the monotone and the 'deadpan' represent, not a 'mask', but a revelation of the essential man. His personages seem aloof because they are naked. There is no question of 'expressionism' rather than 'realism'. The physical is spiritualised; the eternal verities permeate the material world. The location photography—'neo-realism'—expresses not just a particular place, a 'mood' (passing emotions) but a spiritual condition of man without God. (p. 31)

[We] see only the essential moment of each scene, a moment which acquires an eerie concentration from … isolation and emphasis. Often, paradoxically, the essential moment of each scene is omitted. For example, the 'voice of the diary' tells us that the priest 'makes the gesture of total acceptance', which is presumably stretching himself out on the floor of his bedroom in the posture of the cross; but all we see is the priest hauling himself up by the bedrail, afterwards. And this extraordinary omission provides the clue to Bresson's whole method. What matters is not the gesture itself—which might appeal to the spectator for the wrong reasons (its apparent rhetoric), but the fact of the gesture—the attempted contact with God, the attempted self-discipline, and the fact that the gesture does not bring relief. And it is all in his face….

Bresson's film is firmly rooted in the physical—in the reflection of cancer in the priest's face—and the cross is an image of its total sacrifice. The spiritual has devoured the flesh…. The priest's words have the extra precision, the sharpness, the gratuitousness, which corresponds to a childlike—or Godlike—intuition. He has 'realised', because of his tormenting hypersensitivity, something we vaguely sensed, wondered about, but could not quite see. The episode where he guesses that Chantal has a letter, and that letter is a suicide letter, is an outstanding example; but the effect is present in many subtler ways….

It is certainly fair to say that the priest's lack of joy is the result, not of sheer goodness, but of a deep-rooted guilt complex. But I can't agree with those critics who seem to assume that if a film's hero is foolish, immature, weak or unsympathetic, this is in some way a point against the film. On the contrary. Saints don't have to be perfect and this film would not only be ludicrous, but quite impossible, if its hero were a pious pantechnicon of all possible virtures. Of course the priest 'morbidly' makes himself more miserable than he 'should'—the episode with Seraphita during his communion class is an example. Yet perhaps his humourlessness here is a response to Seraphita's real feelings—whereas humour would be simply a cowardly way of restoring his own ease of soul. The kernel of the film is: 'How wonderful that we can give others that peace which we ourselves do not possess. O miracle of our empty hands.'…

A persistent, but insistent, ellipse is the question of despair and suicide. The word is several times led up to, but never quite uttered. Indeed the dialectic of suicide and sacrifice is one of the 'concealed themes' of the novel, and several times their near-identity is hinted at…. The young Curé, a hereditary alcoholic ('Original Sin'?) has nourished himself on bread and wine (the Sacraments?). Yet the symbol of sin and salvation, wine, is the same. And the priest's alcoholism has concealed a cancer—which is, so to speak, a rebellion 'of' the body against the spirit—something malignant and suicidal, foreign to the priest yet within him, like the devil….

Bresson's film is that rare phenomenon, a Christian tragedy, rare precisely because tragedy implies that in this life at least good is pulverised while the evil flourish as the green bay tree; too many Christian moralists seem strangely anxious to assert that good and evil will earn their due reward here and now even if by some mischance there is no life after death. Yet it is because the saint stakes everything on his faith that Christianity has its tragic heroism (and not just the cringing prudence of Pascal's notorious bet). It is essential to the film, as to the novel, that the priest's suffering be maximal, his 'joy' obliterated, and that he reach the limit of experience. Professor Bosanquet once remarked that 'only that optimism is worth its salt which can go all the way with pessimism and arrive at a point beyond it': in Bresson's film the final exaltation is derived neither by mitigating nor by complacently embracing suffering and, here, it seems to me, lies its greatness and humanity. (p. 32)