Bresson, Robert

Diary of a Country Priest - Criterion Collection

Diary of a Country Priest is the first masterpiece by the great Robert Bresson, a towering and slow-working figure in French cinema. Starkly adapted from a successful novel by Georges Bernanos, the film locks in to the mind of a sickly, ineffective young priest trapped in an unfriendly rural area. Bresson charts the priest's collapse with a series of brief scenes, a minimalist style that makes the slightest touch of a hand or far-off sound of a dog barking seem magnified in importance. (This is a movie that must be watched and listened to--it is not a casual experience.) Bresson's luminous portrait of faith and worldly humiliations takes on the intensity of a saint's notebook. In the central role is Claude Laydu, one of Bresson's early experiments with non-actors; his sad, open face is often in close-up, lighting our way into a world of private salvation. --Robert Horton

A young priest arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish, but the apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. The fourth film by Robert Bresson (Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne) finds the director beginning to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away all inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue and the music, and exacting a purity of image and sound. The DVD also features an audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie, deleted scenes and the trailer.

Au Hasard Balthazar (Criterion Collection)

Au hazard Balthazar can have a profoundly moving effect on those who are sensitive to its power. Like any film by Robert Bresson, it provokes widely different responses: Many critics have hailed it as a masterpiece, while others (as Pauline Kael observed) "may find it painstakingly tedious and offensively holy." It all depends on what the viewer brings to Bresson's seemingly simple tale of a donkey named Balthazar, who experiences kindness and cruelty as he is passed from owner to owner. Populated by a variety of sinners and saints alike, the film can be seen as a simple animal fable, as Balthazar suffers nobly at the hands of his handlers. Dig deeper into Bresson's art, however, and you're likely to find a very Catholic story with strong parallels to the life of Christ and his unbearable burden of the sins of mankind.

No matter how you approach the film, only the most cold-hearted viewer will be immune to Balthazar's fate. And if you're not sure what to make of it all, this superb Criterion DVD offers two essential bonus features to guide you toward a greater understanding of Bresson's approach to cinema: Film scholar and devoted "Bressonian" Donald Richie offers his astute observations in a 2004 video interview, and in an in-depth French TV appearance from 1966, Bresson talks at length about Au hazard Balthazar along with fellow directors Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard, and members of the film's cast and crew. This is a remarkable document from a bygone era, when "art film" was at its peak, and directors (especially French ones) were eager to discuss the intellectual significance of their work. Kudos to Criterion for including this archival gem of film appreciation. --Jeff Shannon

A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, director Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar follows a much-abused donkey, Balthazar, whose life strangely parallels that of his owner, Marie. A beast of burden suffering the sins of man, Balthazar nevertheless nobly accepts his fate. Through Bresson's unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this seemingly simple story becomes a moving religious parable of purity and transcendence.

Pickpocket - Criterion Collection

Robert Bresson drew inspiration from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for this examination of an arrogant young pickpocket who deems himself above the laws and conditions of ordinary men. Michel (Martin LaSalle), a rather bland-looking young man with a perpetually blank face, haunts the subways, city streets, and racetracks to ply his trade. He plays a game of wits with a fatherly police inspector and walls his heart off from the affections of a quiet young woman, Jeanne (Marika Green), who looks after his dying mother. Bresson's direction of his "models" (as he calls his nonprofessional performers) strips them of affectation and motivation, making them blank slates defined by the accumulation of precisely drilled actions and words. Pickpocket is no thriller, though Bresson offers impressive, meticulously detailed scenes of daring and intimate robberies (one sequence on a subway feels like an homage to Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street). Rather, it is a powerful, profound search for meaning and spiritual enlightenment by a man who believes in nothing but himself, and many critics consider it Bresson's masterpiece. Paul Schrader, whose book Transcendental Cinema offers a detailed analysis of Bresson's work, has quoted the famous, emotionally restrained yet spiritually moving conclusion in two of his own films: American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. --Sean Axmaker

Robert Bresson's masterful investigation of crime and redemption tells the story of arrogant, young Michel, who spends his days learning the art of picking pockets in the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As Michel grows bolder and more a

Mouchette - Criterion Collection

Perhaps the most accessible of Robert Bresson's films, this story of a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the mercy of the world around her is like a melodrama stripped of flourish. Mouchette is an angry adolescent in the French provinces, the daughter of a drunken bootlegger and a dying, bedridden mother, a pariah in school and a figure of village gossip. She rebels in typically adolescent ways, lobbing mud at teasing classmates and defying wagging tongues with a willful stare, but her deep pain and loneliness pour from her hollow, sad eyes. There's no sentimentality in Bresson's portrait of village life, but for a few brief moments the film explodes with energy and emotion. Mouchette rides the bumper cars at a local fair, flirting with a young boy in loving bumps and deliberate rams, and her dour expression flowers in a smile as the fairground speakers blare a rock & roll tune... until her father's heavy hand slaps her back to reality. It's a moment unlike any other in a Bresson film, a joyous reprieve from the monotony of her life, but if the rest of her existence is glum and hopeless, the film is unexpectedly beautiful. The style is often fragmented--the film opens on a stunning play of hands, feet, and spying eyes as poacher and police both wait for their prey--but the beauty of the forests and meadows creates an idyllic naturalism that leavens Bresson's harsh portrait of the human condition. --Sean Axmaker

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne - Criterion Collection

Robert Bresson's second movie, a melodrama of love, jealousy, revenge, and redemption, is haunted by an uneasy tension between Bresson's ambitions and his directorial compromises. A beautiful but jealous high-society woman (Maria Casarès) tries to spark her longtime lover (a rather wan Paul Bernard) into a declaration of commitment by staging a breakup, and to her horror he agrees to the separation. Seething with resentment, she plots an elaborate vengeance involving getting him to fall in love with a young dancer who "entertains" to support her poverty-stricken family ("I'm no better than a prostitute!" she declaims to her mother), leading to a public disgrace--a grand melodramatic gesture presented with quiet understatement. Using professional actors and a script polished by Jean Cocteau (adapted from the novel Jacques de Fataliste et son Maitre by Denis Diderot), the film is marked by the stylized dialogue and psychologically shaded performances of classical French cinema which Bresson's later films reject. The director's hand can be seen in the austere sets and compositions, the tempered performances, and the moving, spiritually rich conclusion. While it's not Bresson's best work by his own admission, he tames the drama with a rigor that fully flowers in his next film, Diary of a Country Priest. --Sean Axmaker

A Man Escaped

"This story is true," reads the opening statement of A Man Escaped. "I give it as it is, without embellishment." Based on the memoir by Andre Devigny, a member of the French Resistance imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Gestapo during the German occupation, Bresson (himself at one time a German POW) transforms Devigny's daring escape into an ascetic film of documentary detail. Kept in a tiny stone cell with a high window and a thick wooden door, the prisoner (renamed Fontaine in the film) makes himself intimate with his world--every surface of his room, every sound reverberating through the hall, and every detail of the prison's layout that he can absorb in brief sojourns from his cell. Bresson magnifies every detail with insistent close-ups and detailed examinations of every step of Fontaine's plan, from constructing and hiding ropes and hooks to painstakingly carving out an exit in the heavy cell door, and provides a sort of Greek chorus of fellow prisoners. This is Bresson's first film to feature a completely nonprofessional cast drilled to master precise movements and deliver lines without dramatic inflection. The effect is a drama where the slightest gesture carries the weight of a confession. Bresson's films are not for everybody, and this austere picture hardly carries the visceral punch of The Great Escape, but it's a drama of profound power, with a gripping climax that's as absorbing and tense as any high-energy action film. --Sean Axmaker

Lancelot of the Lake

This 1974 masterpiece by the late Robert Bresson (Mouchette) is a remarkable act of mythic revisionism. Stripped bare of its enduring romance, the Arthurian legend in Bresson's hands becomes an ugly and uncomfortably familiar vision of powerful men capable of cruelty, rivalry, disillusionment, and self-destruction. Lancelot (Luc Simon) is portrayed as a ruthless and ignoble opportunist who returns from his impossibly futile mission to locate the Holy Grail, only to callously rekindle his affair with Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas). The emotional impact of the film is that of pure shock: the Arthurian ideal turns out to have little chance in the real world, and as there may be nothing worse than a hollow dream, the Knights of the Round Table descend into selfishness. Known as the great minimalist of French cinema, Bresson uses his trademark repression of energy--editing action sequences so that the visual emphasis is on tiny details--to create a tension that finally snaps with the mucky dissipation of the dream on unhallowed ground: Camelot ending not with a bang or a whimper but with the last clank of armor in a deluded cause. --Tom Keogh

L' Argent

Robert Bresson always claimed his films are about hope and redemption, but so many end in death or suicide that it's a struggle to reconcile the statement with his films. His final film, based on Leo Tolstoy's story The Counterfeit Note, is no different. It's the harrowing tale of an innocent man, Yvon (Christian Patey), whose victimization at the hands of an arrogant upper-class delinquent and a greedy shop owner sends him on a downward spiral into a life of crime. The once-happy husband and father turns bitter, angry, self-pitying, and ultimately coldly brutal in the chilling conclusion. It's Bresson's most expansive film and biggest canvas, weaving the paths of numerous characters across Yvon's journey, but he edits with jackrabbit jumps, running headlong through the story with a painful feeling of inevitability. On its simplest level, Yvon's story is an elaborate chain of cause and effect, the ripples of a selfish act resulting in the fall of a proud man and the destruction of his soul, and Bresson presents every link in that chain with precise, cold clarity. There is little hope evidenced in L'Argent, but there is powerful sense of loss and sadness in this portrait of a society so obsessed with money that it loses its humanity. --Sean Axmaker

Robert Bresson's final masterpiece, L'Argent is a stunning protest against greed and corruption. A boy's parents refuse to lend him money, so a friend gives him a counterfeit 500-franc bill. This one act sets into motion a chain of events that will lead to murder.

The bill passes from hand to hand, and with each exchange comes another betrayal. To protect themselves, shopkeepers pass the bill on to an unsuspecting delivery man, Yvon, who is arrested and sent to prison. Rejecting the world that ruined him, Yvon turns to crime and destruction.

Inspired by a Tolstoy story, one of cinema's great masters creates a powerful tale of innocence corrupted.

Mouchette [Region 2]

Perhaps the most accessible of Robert Bresson's films, this story of a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the mercy of the world around her is like a melodrama stripped of flourish. Mouchette is an angry adolescent in the French provinces, the daughter of a drunken bootlegger and a dying, bedridden mother, a pariah in school and a figure of village gossip. She rebels in typically adolescent ways, lobbing mud at teasing classmates and defying wagging tongues with a willful stare, but her deep pain and loneliness pour from her hollow, sad eyes. There's no sentimentality in Bresson's portrait of village life, but for a few brief moments the film explodes with energy and emotion. Mouchette rides the bumper cars at a local fair, flirting with a young boy in loving bumps and deliberate rams, and her dour expression flowers in a smile as the fairground speakers blare a rock & roll tune... until her father's heavy hand slaps her back to reality. It's a moment unlike any other in a Bresson film, a joyous reprieve from the monotony of her life, but if the rest of her existence is glum and hopeless, the film is unexpectedly beautiful. The style is often fragmented--the film opens on a stunning play of hands, feet, and spying eyes as poacher and police both wait for their prey--but the beauty of the forests and meadows creates an idyllic naturalism that leavens Bresson's harsh portrait of the human condition. --Sean Axmaker

Au Hasard Balthazar [Region 2]

Au hazard Balthazar can have a profoundly moving effect on those who are sensitive to its power. Like any film by Robert Bresson, it provokes widely different responses: Many critics have hailed it as a masterpiece, while others (as Pauline Kael observed) "may find it painstakingly tedious and offensively holy." It all depends on what the viewer brings to Bresson's seemingly simple tale of a donkey named Balthazar, who experiences kindness and cruelty as he is passed from owner to owner. Populated by a variety of sinners and saints alike, the film can be seen as a simple animal fable, as Balthazar suffers nobly at the hands of his handlers. Dig deeper into Bresson's art, however, and you're likely to find a very Catholic story with strong parallels to the life of Christ and his unbearable burden of the sins of mankind.

No matter how you approach the film, only the most cold-hearted viewer will be immune to Balthazar's fate. And if you're not sure what to make of it all, this superb Criterion DVD offers two essential bonus features to guide you toward a greater understanding of Bresson's approach to cinema: Film scholar and devoted "Bressonian" Donald Richie offers his astute observations in a 2004 video interview, and in an in-depth French TV appearance from 1966, Bresson talks at length about Au hazard Balthazar along with fellow directors Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard, and members of the film's cast and crew. This is a remarkable document from a bygone era, when "art film" was at its peak, and directors (especially French ones) were eager to discuss the intellectual significance of their work. Kudos to Criterion for including this archival gem of film appreciation. --Jeff Shannon