“Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.” The cinema of Robert Bresson is difficult to crystallize, but the great director himself came close with these words. The rhythm of a Bresson film has one purpose—to uncover, layer by layer, the effervescent connections between moments; the invisible fabric of life made visible through patient observation. No wonder, then, that his first masterpiece should be adapted from Georges Bernanos’ tale of a hidden, heartbroken village priest suffering in secret for the callous souls in his charge. Training an unerring eye and ear on the plain world of a plain priest—a life steeped in the unspectacular exercise of mercy—Bresson translates the loving gaze of the Father to his camera. The deeply broken humans surrounding our curé are realized with an empathetic frankness, none more so than the tortured Countess whose reconciliation provides the film’s most stunningly realized sequence. Out of this rhythm arises a polyphony of compassion, suffusing every moment of Diary with that generosity which Bazin saw as the cinema’s salient virtue—the love that binds all.
—Nathan Douglas