March 25-31, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Diary of a Country Priest ($39.95 DVD) The difference between Robert Bresson's transcendentally austere Diary and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the difference between spirituality and religiosity. Drawing on Gibson's medieval Catholic upbringing, The Passion strips Jesus of divine wisdom and renders him as a sack of meat, shredded for our sins. No cumbersome parables here; the translation into Aramaic and Latin serves to diminish the role of language altogether. Just brute suffering, rendered in pornographic detail that would unquestionably have revoked the film's R rating were it not for the film's subject matter. With no patience for metaphor, Gibson literalizes every last strike of the whip, inventing some when the Bible fails to provide enough blood. Gibson's insistence may rivet his audiences to their seats (or make them too nauseated to stand), but The Passion's monolithic physicality excludes the divine, which would seem, at least to this lapsed Episcopalian, to be the point. Yes, Jesus suffered, and this Jesus suffers more horribly, more visibly, than movie censors have ever allowed. (Call it Mondo Christ.) But can Gibson claim, or would he, that he suffered more than any human before or since? Can Jesus out-martyr the competition?

What makes the Passion story different from all others (to borrow a phrase from Gibson's favorite faith) ought to be Jesus' divinity -- he certainly wasn't the only man to be put to death horribly for defying the Romans -- but the film is only interested in things that can be depicted with prosthetic latex and stage blood. Surely there ought to be some room in a two-hour movie for a more than cursory nod to Jesus' teachings -- many of which make a good deal of sense no matter what religion you are. But of course, Gibson and his lot have never been too good with the "love thy neighbor" stuff. It's blood and thunder all the way. That's not to say The Passion isn't a sincere movie (if Gibson's marketing strategy was entirely cynical). It's just that Gibson's out to convert, not to question. The Passion has probably spurred quite a few people to go to church for the first time in a long time, but it seems doubtful it could spark any real crisis of faith. It certainly doesn't reflect one.

While Bresson is commonly thought of as a Catholic filmmaker, it's hard not to identify him with the protagonist of his 1950 adaptation of Georges Bernanos' novel. Claude Laydu's priest of Ambricourt (never given a name beyond his office) is the opposite of the stereotypical village clergyman: thin, pale, generally sickly, wracked with physical and mental anguish. In short, he's a mess. His mentor, the priest of Torcy (André Guibert) advises Ambricourt to concentrate on his civic duties -- "Make order all the day long" -- but Ambricourt cannot. He seems to collect all the doubts and sins of this rural French town, whose people mock him on the street and snigger behind his back. When he helps the mother of a dead child to find the peace she needs to die, her daughter denounces Ambricourt to his superiors, as if he were a black magician or a man possessed.

"Your simplicity … is like a flame that burns them," Torcy tells Ambricourt, evoking not just the villagers' resentment but the intensity of Bresson's method. Bresson's devotees like to call his movies "pure cinema," a term I dislike because it implies that cinema has only one essence. What they mean, I think, is that Bresson is the most anti-theatrical of narrative filmmakers, rejecting the idea that scenes ought to flow willy-nilly one into the next (one reason Bresson's films seem longer than others of comparable length). A single shot may convey an idea visually that otherwise would take several minutes of dialogue to explain. Even some great directors use the first shot of a movie to do no more than set the scene: Bresson often tells the whole story in advance, in a single image. (The first thing you learn with Bresson is to commit that image to memory for later reference.) In Diary, it's Ambricourt's observation of what he'll later learn is an adulterous kiss, which makes him an unwilling collaborator in sin. Often unable to eat because of the pain in his stomach, at other times subsisting on sweetened wine and moist bread, the man named for his town suffers for it as well.

Rather than staging Ambricourt's suffering as a Gibsonian orgy of violence, Diary conveys spiritual torment. Laydu doesn't wrack his body or scream to the heavens; like the pain itself, his expression of it is directed inwardly -- to God, not to the world. Bresson always shunned acting as such (though unlike most of Bresson's alumni, Laydu went on to a career in films); Ambricourt's pain is conveyed through Léonce-Henri Burel's lighting, and through the pure, sad quality of Laydu's face and his slender, fragile frame. Like Ambricourt himself, Bresson does not make spectacle of suffering, grabbing for the audience's guts instead of their soul. The box office tells one story, but where The Passion of the Christ depicts a religious experience, Diary of a Country Priest very nearly is one.

La Captive ($24.99 DVD) They share a taste for changing the way we experience time in front of the screen, but where Bresson's characters simmer, Chantal Akerman's go pop -- even if, in the case of Jeanne Dielman, the explosion is delayed for a long time. But in La Captive, loosely adapted from Proust's La Prisonniûre, there's no catharsis, no finality; the whole film might be a rebuke to the very idea of "closure" (a pop-psychological term that would undoubtedly make Akerman want to plunge a pair of scissors into someone's neck). Simon (Stanislas Merhar) is a well-off writer who lives in an expansive Paris flat with his ailing grandmother and Ariane (the marvelous Sylvie Testud), who is something between his live-in girlfriend and his willing captive. Their relationship is a series of elaborately worked-out routines which play out with the repetitiveness of Jeanne Dielman's kitchen chores; each night, Ariane waits in her bedroom for Simon to call and tell her if her services are required, answering with the same words: "Do you want me to come?" Ariane's exit from routine is less cataclysmic than Jeanne's, even though her variances are minor -- entering Simon's bedroom without being asked, spending time with a female friend. But jealous Simon cannot abide such variances: He suspects Ariane of having an affair with her friend, and pays a lesbian couple to describe the nature of girl-girl love to confirm that his suspicions are grounded.

That master-slave relationships confine the captor as much as his charge is something of a truism, but Akerman realizes the insight with breathtaking control. La Captive puts you in Simon's cold, passionless skin. (He's so constrained his relations with Ariane amount to little more than frottage.) The film's chilly restraint can be overwhelming, not to mention the deliberate blankness of the actors' performances. (When Ariane tries to quiet Simon's fears by telling him, "I'd tell you thoughts, if I had any," you believe in her emptiness.) But surely the yawning void, the denial of pleasure, is exactly the point. Think of it as the Safe of breakup movies.

Misc. Picks Secret Cinema opens the vaults for another program of uncensored (read: potentially offensive) Hollywood shorts, plus a top-secret feature which they won't reveal in advance. We tried. (Fri., 8 p.m., Moore College of Art). Chestnut Hill Film Group finishes up the season with an Alec Guinness double feature: The Captain's Paradise and the original The Ladykillers (Tue., 7 p.m., Free Library, Chestnut Hill Branch)

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