L'ARGENT - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Bresson's adaptation of the great Tolstoy novella, "The Forged Coupon" is a masterpiece. To not see it, to not acknowledge its greatness, to not revisit the work again and again and again is to deny the power of cinema and frankly, to deny cinema altogether. "L'Argent" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinematheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt.

L'Argent (1983) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Christian Patey, Caroline Lang, Sylvie Van den Elsen, Vincent Risterucci

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Robert Bresson died in 1999. During his forty years as a director, he made only 15 feature films. On one hand, it's somewhat disgraceful that his uncompromising vision made it so difficult for him to secure financing. On the other, when one looks at filmmakers of equal genius (albeit very different filmmakers), the ease with which they were able to grind out film after film left quite a few stinkers in their canons and as their careers progressed into their august years, the work itself adhered strictly to the law of diminishing returns. For me, Ford and Capra (who, in fairness often took gun-for-hire gigs with studios) are those who fall into this category. There were exceptions to the rule like John Huston, who made his fair share of stinkers, but in his last years generated several terrific pictures and in the case of The Dead, his last film, a bonafide masterpiece.

L'Argent was Bresson's last film and made 15 years before his death. I hate to imagine what those final 15 years were like NOT making a film, but one hopes he took some solace in the fact that this was exactly the sort of final work that every artist dreams of leaving behind. Not only is this picture the ultimate Bresson film - a culmination of his deeply original approach to cinematic storytelling - but is, in fact, a deeply important film; artistically and morally. This is a film that, on its surface seems utterly stripped of redemption for its lead character, for the world and finally, for humanity. This, I believe, IS purely surface. L'Argent may well be one of the great humanist works of the 20th century - up there with the greatest films of Jean Renoir, if not in a stratosphere far above.

While Bresson's work was always secular in its humanism, there was also an adherence to faith - lapsed or otherwise and importantly, never in the sense of religious humanism. L'Argent presents a world where any sense of faith is betrayed and/or quashed and yet, in spite of this (and in spite of the almost cold, calculatingly precise manner in which the tale is rendered), this might well be Bresson's most emotional and affecting film - his most profoundly moving work.

It should probably come as no surprise that L'Argent is based on a literary work by Leo Tolstoy - a writer who practically defined the modern art of narrative (as I'd argue Bresson did with cinema), a great thinker/philosopher (again, not unlike Bresson) and a believer in both faith and a higher power, but ultimately eschewing the corruption and hypocrisy of organized religion (and again, Bresson being cinema's Tolstoy in this regard). Where Bresson and Tolstoy appear to part, at least literally, is that Bresson chose to base his film upon only Part I of Tolstoy's novella "The Forged Coupon" and not touch Part II of the work - the part wherein redemption was sought and found.

For Bresson's great film, this was a brave, brilliant and strangely apt choice.

There is, finally, something mysteriously affecting in Bresson's almost under-a-microscope study of how one immoral action sets off a chain of events, domino-like, of one unethical act after the other until we are faced with the ultimate evil, actions of the most viciously immoral kind - conducted with no remorse, no feeling (not even hate, it seems) and certainly - no redemption.

The tale Bresson spins is relatively faithful to Tolstoy's (though updated to contemporary France). A forged bill is passed on to a hapless soul who is powerless to fight the punishment he receives after unwittingly passing on the fake money. Losing his job and any reasonable prospect of employment to support his wife and child, he takes on the job of a getaway driver during a heist. He is caught, sentenced to prison and loses his child to a fatal illness and his wife who decides to move on and begin a new life. Upon his eventual release from prison, he has nothing. His soul seems drained and his actions become increasingly violent.

Upon committing an utterly heinous and unpardonable sin/crime, he calmly turns himself in - not out of redemption or guilt or compassion, but to further an opportunity to be incarcerated with the person who passed him the bill in the first place - to extract cold, calculated revenge (and by this point, without even the extreme emotion of hatred - revenge becomes almost a base need).

It is here where Bresson offers one of the most astonishing final images and cleaves it off literally with a picture cut to black that is so exquisite, so precise, so emotionally and viscerally powerful, that experiencing it invokes a physical response that is literally breathtaking.

Tolstoy offered us redemption. Bresson denies it to us. Two different approaches to the same material, however, yield similar results. We so desperately cling to the hope that redemption will come to Bresson's central character, that it's OUR HOPE, that IS, finally the redemption. Bresson allows us to seek humanity in ourselves through the inhuman actions of another.

This is a masterpiece.

To not see it, to not acknowledge this, to not revisit this great work again and again and again is to deny cinema and the power of cinema - one that even Tolstoy himself in his final years lamented not having an opportunity to tackle.

Cinema is a great gift.

Bresson, however, was the greatest gift to cinema.

L'Argent is his greatest film.

"L'Argent" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Saturday March 17 at 4PM and Sunday March 18 at 4:45PM . Tickets are available HERE. "L'Argent" is also available on DVD.

FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - An inconsequential Bresson film. It had to happen sooner or later. "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinematheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt.

Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forêts, Maurice Monnoyer

**1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, but I have to admit I'm less than pleased to discover that there exists a Robert Bresson film I don't much care for. It's not that the movie is bad, but it feels both inconsequential AND pretentious.

Based loosely on Dostoyevsky's "White Nights", the movie tells the extremely uninteresting tale of Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a good-looking mopey-dopey dreamy-pants who wanders Paris seeking the woman of his dreams and to find inspiration for his art - which frankly, is not very good.

One evening he spies a gorgeous young thing on the verge of taking a dive off a bridge. Jacques convinces the lovely Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) to live. Besides, her reason for wanting to die is rather foolish. Her erstwhile lover promised to meet her and didn't show up and she's beginning to suspect he doesn't love her.

The couple spend the next three nights wandering around Paris as we get flashbacks via their conversation about their backstories - which also aren't all that interesting. Marthe comes from a lower class family and her Mom is hoping to marry her off to a rich man. Jacques, on the other hand, spends most of his time stalking beautiful young women. Jacques's activities are certainly not without merit since Bresson has wisely chosen to populate the movies with mega-babes as the objects of his ocular attention.

The couple eventually falls in love, but do not adequately express their feelings to one another and eventually, they run into Marthe's wayward lover and she dumps Jacques in favour of the rich boy.

Bresson has always focused up characters of considerable complexity and in some cases, they're downright detestable. In spite of the latter, all the characters engender empathy. Neither of the characters in this movie seem especially worth following for 90 minutes.

On the plus side, the movie is extremely well shot and I love Bresson's vibrant colour palette - especially in the nighttime scenes in Paris.

At some point, I plan to re-read "White Nights" and watch Four Nights of a Dreamer again.

It's Bresson, after all. And thankfully, it isn't a stinker.

I'm hoping I'll be more positively disposed at a later juncture, but for now, it merits mild interest. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but they all can't be masterpieces.

"Four Nights of a Dreamer" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Sunday March 11 at 5PM and Wednesday April 4 at 6:30PM. Tickets are available HERE. "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is also available on DVD.

UNE FEMME DOUCE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Bresson's first film in colour is a detached portrait of a loveless marriage based upon the short story by Dostoyevsky. As always, this unique clinical approach renders elements of humanity that are so often elusive in cinema. This film is included in the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson, organized & curated by legendary film programmer-curator extraordinaire James Quandt.

Une Femme Douce (1969) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Dominique Sanda, Guy Frangin, Jeanne Lobre

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

From the top floor of an apartment building balcony, a white scarf floats gently in the breeze while its owner, a stunningly beautiful young woman (Dominique Sanda) lies crumpled on the pavement after an intentional fatal dive. We know her fate, but Robert Bresson, through the cold narration of her husband (Guy Frangin) takes us on the harrowing journey that led to her decision.

Une Femme Douce is not only the portrait of a loveless marriage, but given the perspective Bresson has chosen to impart the tale, it's as much a film about how cruel and blind a man can be when he places the gaining of material wealth before the happiness of both himself and the woman he purports to love.

Bresson never waivers from the husband's biased rendering of the marriage. Though we are shown everything through the greed-clouded memory of this one man, we see what he doesn't. Bresson, however, does not use his directorial hand to guide us. He shows us what is plainly before the man. We, are the ones who make up our own minds as we piece the puzzle together.

This unique approach to storytelling is what has made the film one of the greatest of all time, and yet another magnificent example of work that influenced filmmakers the world over.

Adapted from the Fyodor Dostoyevsky story "Krotkaiya" ("A Meek Woman"), Bresson updates the tale to contemporary France, but remains faithful to the literary source. The major change is that the man in the Dostoyevsky piece was a disgraced former member of the military who becomes a lowly pawnbroker. Bresson wisely and brilliantly places the character in a position that would speak more clearly to audiences of today by making him a disgraced former banker. This also plays brilliantly into the petty stinginess of the character.

At first, the man seems genuinely taken with the willowy young lady who enters his shop with one knick-knack after another and he continually gives her far more money than her items are worth. Their exchanges are marked by the woman's silence, but eventually, she drops her guard and the two begin to talk.

He eventually professes his love to her and begs for her hand in marriage. To his delight, she accepts. Their wedding night proves to be a success - at least according to the man and he welcomes his new bride into his shop and begins to teach her about both the business and the joys of capitalism.

Things seem pleasant enough, but slowly the woman begins to show compassion for those who desperately come to the pawn shop - parting with their sentimental baubles in exchange for a tiny bit of cash in order to live. She begins to pay people more than what the items are worth. In a sense, she is doing what he husband did for her. The difference in that her designs are genuinely altruistic. His were an insidious attempt to "buy" her love.

The husband, sees none of this, It's right before his eyes.

Through Bresson's camera, it's before our eyes also.

His wife's charitable nature angers him and he becomes even more obsessed with the idea that she must be drilled more intensely with the regimen of greed. She rejects this, as she also begins to reject his increasing cheapness in all matters. This infuriates him to the point of distraction and her eventual and continual disappearing acts when she gets angry, metamorphosise from pure anger into extreme jealousy as he assumes she has taken a lover.

When she falls gravely ill, however, he showers her with the finest medical attention money can buy, dotes upon her endlessly and professes his love anew - promising that he will devote himself to her wholeheartedly and furthermore, that he will arrange a lovely, extended vacation for the two of them.

This, should be enough to suggest that things will turn around.

This, however, is a film by Robert Bresson - adapted, no less, from Dostoyevsky.

Two key symbols reign over the film. One is the image of cages in a zoo - shot from inside the cage and looking upon both the man and woman as they peer at the animals. On one hand, it might be suggested that she is in a prison - or more accurately, a zoo cage. She's a live creature with its wings clipped by this petty bourgeois pawnbroker.

This is true enough, but the fact remains that Bresson's camera eye peers at both of them through the cage. In fact, the camera is below eye level as they look up at the monkeys in the cage. The camera itself is, on one hand detached and clinical, but because it is not a direct point of view shot from the animals' eye-line, it's especially clear that the husband and wife are the prisoners. Both of them are incarcerated, but it's the worst kind. They're trapped together in a cell that neither of them should be sharing.

The second, and perhaps most powerful symbol is a plastic moulding of Jesus on the cross which she takes to the pawnbroker early in the film. He's far more interested in the gold cross which the plastic Jesus is affixed to. He removes Christ, handles the gold greedily, places the lucre on a scale and offers her a whack of cash and the Jesus figurine. This cheap plastic Jesus takes on considerable resonance in both this scene and much later on. On the surface, it is a seemingly worthless bauble, but is, in fact representative - at least to the woman - of something much greater.

Once again, Bresson's mise-en-scene is imbued with a precision few directors can even come close to rendering and his pace, though measured, and his shots, though seemingly straightforward and his takes, far longer than what's normally expected, especially in contemporary cinema, all contribute to generating a film that is pure Bresson.

As such, it is a film of extraordinary power and even within Bresson's almost clinical approach, it is practically exploding with humanity of the most indelible kind.

The final image of her coffin being screwed shut cuts breathtakingly to black and we are left in the darkness to contemplate all that is human, all that is wretched, all that is humanity itself.

Bresson plunges us headlong into the terrible beauty of life and what it means to be human.

We are, without a doubt, all the better for it.

"Une Femme Douce" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Thursday March 8 at 6PM and Saturday March 10 at 4PM . Tickets are available HERE. "Une Femme Douce" is also available on DVD.

Le Diable Probablement (The Devil, Probably) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Though made in 1977, this stunning film is ahead of its time. Examining the disharmony felt by youth from a world they seem to have no power to change, Bresson creates a movie for ALL TIME - as moving and powerful as it is detached and clinical. This masterpiece is a most welcome inclusion in the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson, organized & curated by legendary film programmer-curator extraordinaire James Quandt.

Le Diable Probablement (The Devil, Probably) (1977) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Laetitia Carcano, Henri de Maublanc, Régis Hanrion

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

The key to unlocking the mysteries of this extraordinary film by Master Robert Bresson is, at least for me, found within a scene depicting a bus ride where the central character Charles (Monnier) declares that "governments are shortsighted". A nearby passenger responds that governments are not to blame for the sorry state of the world, but that "the masses" are the true guilty party.

I think there's truth in both. The masses, or to my way of thinking, the sheep - are like the blind leading the blind and because of the lack of foresight within majorities, they are easily influenced by governments, who in turn hold the POWER to lead, but for all the wrong reasons.

In the same scene, another passenger responds with a query that implies that someone or something forces the masses to "determine events" and that this mocks humanity. As such, he wonders who or what precisely leads the masses "by the nose".

The answer provided by the first passenger, which happens to also be the the title of the film is, quite simply: "The Devil, probably." For me, the Devil he/Bresson refers to IS government, or whatever true power is that GUIDES government. There is an evil in the World and it IS the Devil as, of course, a symbol of evil which is, in turn, one and the same with the God created by mankind (no matter which religion, ultimately - save perhaps for Buddhism) to instil fear, and in so doing, to yield the ignorance necessary to guide the masses any which way they need to be guided.

Even more telling for me is that Bresson has chosen to set his film against the backdrop of the student riots in France during the 70s whereupon, in the film's early stages, the almost Christ-like figure of Charles (the clearly non-Semitic, almost Nordic European version popularized in so much art during the first millennium) rejects the well-meaning, but ultimately empty rhetoric of the movement's leaders. Like Christ, Charles knows in his heart that he must sacrifice his life. The clear difference though, has less to do with making a sacrifice for mankind, but for himself.

Charles is disconnected from society and from the beginning of the movie we know he is dead. Bresson takes us back in time and we join Charles on his odyssey to seek some meaning and/or spiritual guidance during his last months - hoping he CAN change his mind about committing suicide.

Unlike Christ, though, he does not spend 40 days and 40 nights in the desert - alone with his Father. Charles seeks solace in the society he feels disconnected to. Abandoning the youth movement, he looks to the company of friends, nature, education, religion and even psycho-therapy. He receives no answers.

His choice becomes clear.

There is, however, a powerful implication that even Charles, for all his rejection of society, and most importantly, religion, still adheres to the idea that suicide is a sin and he seeks someone to murder him in order to not pull the trigger himself, thus risking eternal damnation.

Bresson creates yet another masterpiece. He hangs back and almost clinically depicts Charles's journey with the detachment of a scientist observing a specimen. There is, however, NOTHING cold about the thoughts and emotions this approach elicits. The movie is as deeply and profoundly moving an experience as great art should be - fuelling the mind and spirit whilst generating the visceral response of sadness, even despair.

The universality of this story is so overwhelming. Youth, no matter what generation they're from, has always experienced a disconnect from a society ruled by others. In this sense, the film feels as fresh today as it must have been in 1977.

One of the most powerful sequences has a group of the young people in a library A/V room watching a 16mm print of a documentary as they make notes for what might be a class assignment or even to simply provide some illumination upon their own disharmony with the world. The footage they watch looks like it could have been filmed just yesterday - depicting mankind's abuse of nature - everything from the culprits behind the depletion of the ozone layer to the horrific battering of a baby seal's head. We're as devastated with these images as are the young people watching them.

I defy any thinking person, no matter what their generation, to not be shaken, shattered and hopefully, illuminated by this great film that will, no doubt, live forever.

"Le Diable Probablement" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Sunday March 4 @ 5PM and Thursday March 15 @ 6:30 PM. Tickets are available HERE. "Le Diable Probablement" is also available on DVD.

THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Bresson brilliantly transforms the actual trial transcripts and eye-witness testimonies of those who were present during one of the most heinous miscarriages of justice in human history. Part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective organized & curated by legendary film programmer-curator extraordinaire James Quandt, this is a powerful dramatic portrait of religious hypocrisy and inherent misogyny within the Catholic Church. And, uh, it's not unlike a really great episode of Perry Mason - a thoroughly involving, mesmerizing and compulsive courtroom drama. (I now prostrate myself for the benefit of snooty cineastes who wish to flagellate me for saying this.)

The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Florence Delay (Carrez), Jean-Claude Fourneau

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

"I had a daughter born in lawful wedlock who grew up amid the fields and pastures. I had her baptized and confirmed and brought her up in the fear of God. I taught her respect for the traditions of the Church as much as I was able to do given her age and simplicity of her condition. I succeeded so well that she spent much of her time in church and after having gone to confession she received the sacrament of the Eucharist every month. Because the people suffered so much, she had a great compassion for them in her heart and despite her youth she would fast and pray for them with great devotion and fervor. She never thought, spoke or did anything against the faith. Certain enemies had her arraigned in a religious trial. Despite her disclaimers and appeals, both tacit and expressed, and without any help given to her defense, she was put through a perfidious, violent, iniquitous and sinful trial. The judges condemned her falsely, damnably and criminally, and put her to death in a cruel manner by fire." - Statement by Isabelle Romee, Joan of Arc's mother, made prior to the commencement of the Catholic kangaroo court proceedings against her daughter.

Go ahead. Call it sacrilegious if you will, but for me, Robert Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc is, at one level, imbued with such intensity, that it delivers a kind of pulp ferocity reminiscent of the best episodes of Perry Mason, the long-running TV series from the Erle Stanley Gardner novels that starred Raymond Burr. Shoot me. Crucify me. Burn me at the stake. Bresson deserves reverence, serious analysis and just plain worship, BUT he also needs to be acknowledged for delivering film after film that harnesses every bit of the medium's power to generate material that is as compulsively entertaining and thrilling as the best movies are, and should be. And this film rocks big-time!

My first helping of the picture had me on the edge of my seat - in spite of, like all of Christendom, knowing the tale of the Maid of Orleans. Joan of Arc was the simple French peasant girl who, proclaiming the voice of God was guiding her, successfully led an army against British rule over her country and was subsequently turned over to England, tried for heresy and burned at the stake. Her story is that of an utterly horrible betrayal and miscarriage of justice at the hands of her fellow countrymen and the Catholic Church.

Using the actual trial transcripts and eye-witness testimonies of those who were present, Bresson's film has all the snap, crackle and pop of great courtroom drama. Watching the movie is, like many a fine procedural, gripping in that maddening fashion where we witness someone who is clearly innocent being hammered by a judicial system bent on proving its case at any cost. The difference, of course, is that the judiciary in this case are outfitted in the robes of the Catholic Church rather than that of "the Crown" and there is NO Perry Mason to save the accused. (I suppose I could say, that Joan's Perry Mason is God, and that for many, Perry Mason is, in fact God, but I'll refrain from doing so.)

The vast majority of the film's running time is the back-and-forth between Joan (Florence Delay) and her primary interrogator Bishop Cauchon (Jean-Claude Fourneau) - first in an open "court", then within Joan's cell (to keep the rabble to a minimum and control the proceedings further). Bresson employs his trademark approach of coaching his actors (or, if you will, non-actors - Delay was an academic and Fourneau a renowned painter) to deliver their lines as naturally as possible - in longer takes and almost never in closeup.

Even with his usual style, the original transcriptions come across as expertly rendered courtroom dialogue. In reality, neither Cauchon nor Joan (especially) were no fools. They both give as good as they get. For every volley fired by Cauchon, Joan retaliates with a vigour and intelligence that knocks the Bishop on his ass - and, for that matter vice-versa.

Cauchon needs to find Joan guilty of heresy. Joan needs to fight for her life. The stakes are high for both parties and one senses that on occasion there are even moments of a strange mutual admiration between the two opposing forces - so much so that one is almost rooting for that turn in the plot (as it were) when Cauchon comes to his senses and dispenses with this whole sham of a trial.

Where things become especially gripping and extremely emotional for a viewer is that Cauchon will NEVER have this turn - we know this because we know what ultimately happened, but also, we see how Cauchon is trying to twist everything Joan says and, in fact, is even trying to control what's being entered into the official record. At one point, both the audience and Joan are agog when the findings are read out loud and clearly, obviously ignore EVERYTHING that's preceded them.

As the trial moves forward, there's a horrific ever-mounting inevitability to the proceedings. Bresson, for all his (and his academic critics) crowing about how he eschews traditional filmmaking techniques, the movie, under the steady guidance of Bresson's direction, often betrays this notion and careens brilliantly as if it were a courtroom procedural par excellence.

Between the courtroom scenes, Bresson delivers moments of solace with Joan in her cel. These provide a certain respite from the proceedings and allow Joan and the audience an opportunity to contemplate what's been going on and, more importantly, what might be next. The pace this creates is so dynamic that again, it almost flouts the traditional Bressonian approach. I'd argue, however, it not so much sways from his style, but uses his style to deliver the sort of gripping cinematic narrative he so often tries to distance himself from.

The bottom line is that this is yet another Bresson film which, for me, displays both his art AND exceptional craft. As a filmmaker, he runs rings round almost every other filmmaker who ever existed (or will EVER exist).

I've probably spent enough time linking Bresson's work here to, uh, Perry Mason, so allow me to briefly make the inevitable comparison between The Trial of Joan of Arc with Carl Dreyer's immortal The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dreyer brings austerity to his approach also, but it's in the art direction most of all. The rooms are strangely unadorned and chalk white, whereas Bresson's rooms feel much "fuller" - perhaps mostly due to his rich, yet more straightforward compositions.

Dreyer employed the more baroque approach to composition - strange angles, intense closeups, crazed cutting (over 1500 cuts and many of them brilliantly breaking every rule of montage) and virtually no sense of spatial reference. Dreyer seeks to disorient us - so much so, that he flings us at Joan in a manner that we become Joan and feel every horrendous accusation volleyed at her.

Bresson, on the other hand, is far more measured. His compositions and lighting are gorgeous, but they are also there to place emphasis upon the proceedings and to understand Joan's place in this perverse kangaroo court and how she deals with it. Dreyer's Joan is assaulted, as are we, the audience, from beginning to end. Bresson's Joan fights back - again and again, while we seemingly fight back with her.

Amidst his manically edited mise-en-scene, replete with off-kilter perspectives, Dreyer's lighting emphasizes shades of white and grey, whereas Bresson plays with light in very different ways and is not afraid to fill his frame with darkness. All this said, however, it would be remiss of me to not mention that Bresson too employs a few extraordinary shots that are not straight-forward at all. One of the more powerful visual juxtapositions occurs at both the beginning and end of the film where Bresson employs a moving camera in both to follow two very different strides Joan takes - one towards her trial, the other towards her execution. Both are examples of Bresson's visual virtuosity and how he uses his camera eye to elicit emotional responses - again BOTH in Joan and we, the audience.

Dreyer, like Bresson, adhered to the transcripts of the actual trial, but his film is silent and he is forced by that very necessity to create a completely different approach. (The respective actresses playing Joan also couldn't be any different in look and playing style - yet both provide more than convincing and passionate renderings of the same character.) Dreyer creates a soundscape, a music, if you will, with his cutting style. Watching the film WITHOUT musical accompaniment is proof positive of this. Bresson, on the other hand, uses sound to convey more than dialogue. He builds an aural world with choice sound effects and employing silence as either the natural metre of said dialogue or to provide the aforementioned moments of solace. And in two instances, Bresson employs ear-shattering whacks on a drum skin that are so sharp, so jarring and jangling, you feel like you're being battered - assaulted.

Both works are highly experiential and use the same source material, but both seek to tackle this tragic tale by providing respective experiences that on their own are very powerful, but when viewed side-by-side are perhaps the greatest artistic rendering of this very real and horrifying subjugation of a strong and intelligent woman at the odious patriarchal hands of the Catholic Church.

The Trial of Joan of Arc exists, finally, in its own unique realm. The movie is a slice of life that uses all that cinema can offer to create a film that will infuriate, excite and finally move you to tears.

It's utterly devastating.

"The Trial of Joan of Arc" is screening as part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday March 2 at 6PM. Tickets are available HERE. "The Trial of Joan of Arc" is also available on DVD.

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR - Review by Greg Klymkiw - The Greatest Bresson of them all. "Au Hasard Balthazar" is perhaps the most important inclusion within the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson, organized & curated by legendary film programmer-curator extraordinaire James Quandt.

Au hasard Balthazar (1966) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green, François Lafarge, Philippe Asselin, Nathalie Joyaut, Jean-Claude Guilbert

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

“Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings . . . [The Law of Attraction] argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity."" - Chris Hedges

Not much has changed since Robert Bresson gave us his extraordinary Au hasard Balthazar. Poverty, ignorance and hatred run rampant, yet hidden within the miasma of humanity is grace. Some of us find it, others sadly discover it in death. Bresson's entire canon of cinema unflinchingly presents an "external reality" so full of depth and I think that perhaps this is no more powerful and apparent than in this heartbreaking tale of a donkey - from birth to death. Bresson begins with the purest state of grace - that of seeming innocence and ends, finally, in the ultimate state of grace where a life lived meets its demise and we hope, finds peace.

This is a movie that always moved me deeply. With each viewing it plumbed spiritual and emotional depths that few movies could offer so consistently. As I grew ever-older and realized how so much had not really changed in the world, it became a film that was alternately ever-difficult to watch and yet, impossible to turn away from. Perhaps this is because I increasingly seemed to take the perspective of the beleaguered Balthazar - watching the lives onscreen that paralleled his own, yet thinking of the lives (including my own) beyond the frame of Bresson's cinematic borders.

This is great art - it grows with you and remains universal.

The tale is simple. Balthazar as a foal receives the love, gentle caresses and blessings of Maria and Jacques (Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green) who also pledge their eternal love for each other before both the Heavens and the dark coloured, white-tufted gentle donkey. As time passes, however, Balthazar is passed from owner to owner - experiencing brutal beatings and back-breaking work. Jacques continues to carry a torch for Marie, but she finds herself attracted to the cool, leather-jacketed brute Gérard (François Lafarge) who uses her and abuses her. Marie's Father (Philippe Asselin) drives his family and fortunes to ruin with his stubborn pride while her Mother (Nathalie Joyaut) helplessly and disapprovingly casts her eye to the actions of husband and daughter.

Through all of this, Balthazar suffers pain, exhaustion and indignity - his only respite being led to an occasional bucket of food or water and his stable at night. He is briefly passed into the hands of the town drunk (Jean-Claude Guilbert) who treats him with kindness, not unlike Marie at the beginning of his life and the old woman who regards him as a "saint" towards his demise. For poor Balthazar, the only time he receives any sort of adulation is in one of the most extraordinary sequences ever committed to film when he is leased out to a circus and performs a spectacular mathematics trick under the big top.

Bresson never resorts to giving Balthazar "human" reactions to anything he witnesses. As the lives of the people in his life proceed, Bresson will occasionally cut to a close or medium shot of the donkey's poker face and/or seemingly blank eyes. In those eyes, soulful, deep, watery - we supply our own thoughts and perceptions as if Balthazar is the mirror into which we gaze for our soul. It's not unlike those times when one kneels in a church, gazing up at a twisted crucifix bearing Christ - we search for answers in an image of suffering.

The usual reactions we get from Balthazar to anything in the film are when his whole body flinches in pain at the crack of a whip, a blow from a fist, or in one of the cruelest moments, when the nasty Gérard affixes a piece of paper to the donkey's tail and sets it on fire. Even more poignant is a scene when the soulful Balthazar flinches in terror at the horrendous explosions that occur when bunch of drunken young men let off several firecrackers near him.

When Balthazar, near death, rests in a gentle meadow filled with sheep, who at first surround him, then leave him alone to die - quietly and at peace - we weep.

We weep for all of God's creatures and the hope that grace will somehow finally touch us all.

With Au hasard Balthazar, Bresson gives us a film that is as much about this abused donkey as it is about the cruel, prideful, ignorant and uncaring people who wend in and out of his horrendous life. He gives us a world where we must ultimately feel both empathy and sympathy for all of these creatures - a world where we must gaze deep into the eyes of a donkey and experience humanity in all its bitter realities.

It is, finally, as much about us as anything else and there are ultimately few films that achieve this with the grace and power that are rendered here by Monsieur Bresson

"Au hasard Balthazar" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Sunday February 26 at 5:00 PM and Thursday March 1 at 6:00 PM. "Au hasard Balthazar" is also available on a stunning Criterion Collection DVD. The extra features on this disc are especially tremendous - most notably, a one-hour French television documentary from the film's time of release that focuses upon the film in such depth that it makes one long for this kind of analysis and exploration in contemporary works in the same way (instead of the pathetic puff-pieces that feel more like electronic press kits). "Au hasard Balthazar" is definitely worth owning, but only AFTER or in TANDEM with seeing the picture ON A BIG SCREEN - ON FILM.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne - Review By Greg Klymkiw - With magnificently overwrought melodramatic dialogue by Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson's dark, sexy tale of vengeance is not unlike some alternately vicious and romantic Gallic pairing of Fritz Lang and James M. Cain with healthy dollops of MGM womens' weepies. "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" is part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson as organized and curated by the legendary film programmer and curator extraordinaire James Quandt.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Maria Casarès, Paul Bernard, Elina Labourdette, Lucienne Bogaert

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and Robert Bresson easily delivers one of the sexiest, nastiest femmes fatales ever committed to film in his truly astounding Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Maria Casarès, who played the memorable Nathalie in Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise and was a favourite of Cocteau, takes on the role here of Hélène, a stunningly gorgeous woman of considerable affluence whose boredom and trifling leads to playing a dangerous game of deception and revenge.

Casarès is so astounding in this role, it sometimes shocks me that she wasn't whisked away to Hollywood by the likes of David O. Selznick to bring the sort of exotic foreign flare to Tinseltown studio pictures that the likes of Hedy Lamar, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich delivered. With cheekbones to die for, dark piercing eyes, a stunning aquiline proboscis and lips that were made to alternately plant big wet smooches and to drip with blood, Casarès commands the screen here with the sort of screen presence designed to tantalize and terrorize.

She might well be the original spider woman of cinema - and her kiss is most deadly.

When Hélène seeks to liven things up with her foppish lover Jean (Paul Bernard), she offers up a "Dear John" speech designed to engorge his gonads and get him hot and bothered enough to put some spice back into their affair. Jean, not one to take a hint, boneheadedly admits to feeling similarly. He proposes they maintain their deep love as FRIENDS, but part as lovers.

Jean, take it from me, this was not a good move.

Hélène is cool about it all. Too cool. Her mind calculates a plan to get the ultimate revenge upon Jean - one that's so "take-no-prisoners" in its approach that it threatens to bring more than one innocent party down. She sets the wheels in motion for Jean to fall so madly in love with another woman, Agnès (Elina Labourdette) that he obsessively pursues her (with Hélène's manipulative assistance) until she falls in love with him too.

Marriage bells are imminent and Hélène even offers to completely coordinate the lavish public nuptials. Jean, it seems, has fallen for a former prostitute. Most of Parisian society is aware of this. Jean, blindly and madly in love, is not.

The story, rife as it is with so many foul twists and turns orchestrated by the nasty Black Widow Spider Woman, is a corker. While we follow with pure salacious joy, Bresson makes superb use of Jean Cocteau's ripe dialogue with a mise-en-scene that delivers a grotesque creepy-crawly pace that's punctuated several times with emotional coldcocks upon both the viewer and the characters in the piece whom Hélène victimizes.

After the wedding ceremony, Agnès takes ill when she discovers the guest list is replete with all the men she has serviced as a prostitute. Jean, still unaware of the deception perpetrated upon him is greeted with Hélène's foul scorn when she maliciously announces to him outside the church: "You've married a tramp. Now you must face the consequences. You're suddenly so sentimental. Since your marriage seems to mean so much to you, you mustn't run off. Return to Agnès' side. You won't be the only one to console her. All her lovers are inside. And there are plenty of them!"

Both the dialogue and Casarès's delivery are like a butcher knife to the gut. We've experienced her manipulations, but we've also been dragged through the pain Agnès has felt throughout the film - trying to hide her shame, trying to deny the love she feels for Jean and wishing she could undo everything to finally, for once, experience the sort of joy in life she once imagined having in childhood.

Bresson knocks us flat-out - not just with despair, but in those moments the film flirts with and eventually succumbs to the purity and power of love.

His movie is at once heartbreakingly dark and wildly romantic. Once again, it seems, for all of Bresson's (and his egghead champions) insistence upon avoiding typical tropes of commercial cinema, he yields a movie that offers everything an audience would want - including the kitchen sink.

That said, it's Robert Bresson's kitchen sink and as such, he delivers both the real goods and great cinema all at once. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is deeply moving and Bresson proves, once again, that he has few equals.

"Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Thursday February 23 06:30 PM and Monday March 5 06:30 PM. "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" is also available on a stunning Criterion Collection DVD. This is definitely worth owning, but only AFTER or in TANDEM with seeing the picture ON A BIG SCREEN - ON FILM.

To order tickets and read Quandt's fabulous program notes, visit the TIFF website HERE.

Lancelot du Lac - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Robert Bresson's brilliant revisionist take on the Knights of the Round Table. "Lancelot du Lac" is part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson as organized/curated by legendary film programmer/curator James Quandt

Lancelot du Lac (1974) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Luc Simon, Laura Duke Condominas, Humbert Balsan, Vladimir Antolek-Oresek, Patrick Bernard

****

By Greg Klymkiw

While I think my favourite Knights of the Roundtable movie is still John Boorman's Excalibur, Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac is pretty damned extraordinary. Unlike Boorman's lush, baroque approach to the tales popularized by Sir Thomas Malory's famed literary collection of Arthurian legends "Le Morte d'Arthur", Bresson applies a strange, stripped-down rendering that is equally compelling.

We're all familiar with these legends and Bresson pretty much sticks to our expectations on the story front. The Knights have returned to Camelot utterly shagged-out and decimated after a futile search for The Holy Grail. Sir Lancelot (Luc Simon) still loves Guinevere the Queen (Laura Duke Condominas) and she, in turn, has been pining for his manly attentions for far too long. Lancelot, however, bummed-out for boinking King Arthur's (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek) wife, decides he must put an end to the deception as its an affront to King, Country and God.

The nasty cowardly Mordred (Patrick Bernard) starts spreading well-founded rumours about the queen's infidelities and though Lancelot tries to offer his hand in friendship to this foul illegitimate inbred son, Mordred has other plans - nefarious ones, of course. As Mordred tries plying dissent, the Knights start getting antsy because Arthur's closed down the Round Table and has decided to await word from God for their next mission.

To keep them happy and with Knight Gawain's (Humbert Balsan) help, a major jousting tournament is organized. Carnage ensues on the fields of this deadly sport until Lancelot decides to shift gears and become Guinevere's protector once more.

More carnage ensues.

Several elements contribute to the strange phenomenon that is Lancelot du Lac. First and foremost is the briefly aforementioned stripped-down approach to the drama. The film is gorgeously shot as Bresson favours longer takes, few closeups and almost no cutaways during dialogue sequences. Add to this the odd, almost somnambulistic quality of the performances and the movie has a deliciously weird flavour that feels like a cross between Bresson's normal unfettered style with an almost visible and intentional directorial hand in rendering the drama in this fashion.

The action sequences are especially brilliant. Here Bresson employs a far more cut-intensive approach. However, rather than the typically contemporary herky-jerky style of action cutting that seems to drag almost every modern action sequence to ridiculous extremes with a sloppy sense of geography, Bresson employs numerous lightning-quick cuts that emphasize the raw brutality of the violence. The filmmaking is exciting, to be sure, but the acts of violence are not - they're vicious, nasty and almost matter-of-fact.

When Bresson cuts action, he does so in a pounding, visceral fashion, but not to add the sort of fake thrills and suspense modern audiences are sadly getting used to, but rather, to place emphasis on the truly horrific elements of man-to-man warfare. As brutal and brilliant as Boorman's violence was in Excalibur, it was presented as "Boys' Own" derring-do. There's nothing romantic about Bresson's carnage.

During the jousting sequences Bresson brilliantly gives us a clear sense of geography in terms of the division between spectators and participants, but on the field of honour itself, he skews our overall sense of geography and emphasizes individual physical rituals that suck us deeply into the carnage. There are a handful of close medium shots, for example, where the camera is locked down in terms of the frame. In the foreground we see the smooth, clearly powerful and especially deadly end of the lance, while the background moves ever-so furiously forward as knight and horse charge towards their opponent.

Bresson also makes his trademark stunning use of sound with a barrage of rhythmic drums beats, hoof pounding, bagpipe blurts, clangs of metal and the horrendous crunch of lance-against metal/shield/flesh.

The bloodletting, it should be noted, is copious and geyser-like. Whereas it's clearly horrendous in this film, some audiences might be compelled to laugh when they realize how clearly Bresson's violence here must have been a huge influence upon Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones when they directed their own skewed (albeit satirical) portrait of the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

With Lancelot du Lac, Bresson once again delivers a motion picture that breaks every rule under the sun, but does so with such precision and intent that it works on a level of cinematic-boundary-breaking while providing entertainment that works on emotional, visceral and intellectual levels.

"Lancelot du Lac" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. The film is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Monday February 20 06:30 PM and Tuesday March 6 09:00 PM. The February 20 screening includes a lecture by Brian Price.

To order tickets and read Quandt's fabulous program notes, visit the TIFF website HERE.

DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Robert Bresson's perfect film is proof positive of cinema's power to instil faith and regeneration. "Diary of a Country Priest" is part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson as organized/curated by legendary film programmer/curator James Quandt.

Diary of a Country Priest (1951) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Claude Laydu, Nicole Ladmiral, Jean Riveyre, Marie-Monique Arkell, Rachel Bérendt, Bernard Hubrenne, Martine Lemaire

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

“Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But, we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit”. 1st Corinthians 12:13

Cinema is sacred. Robert Bresson understood this more than any filmmaker. Furthermore, his utterly perfect Diary of a Country Priest, embodying the true power of cinema, is a motion picture as sacred as the medium of film itself and endowed with the greatest ability to transcend all that art has given us.

It is grace itself.

The ability of cinema to instil faith and regeneration are, I think, unparalleled and certainly, Bresson achieved this through much of his career. Though he generated great work before and after Diary of a Country Priest, there are no other films in his canon (and few films generated by a handful of others) that deserve as lofty a stature.

Even now, in an age when many have given up on this artistic medium to soar, to truly fulfill the promise it first held at the turn of the 20th century, movies continue - against incredible odds - to be the one artistic medium to bring together so many facets of expression, that to give up on it feels more heretical than anything anyone (including the Catholics) could dream up. Though most contemporary theatrical feature films are generated cynically as roller coaster rides for the (seemingly) indiscriminate, this surely is no different than the dawn of cinema when the medium was akin to a carnival sideshow trifle. Besides, in the hundred years of its existence, there have always been artists who used (and continue to use) the medium in ways that allow us to soar beyond the mere visceral - to touch our hearts and minds in ways that few art forms can attain.

Leo Tolstoy, arguably one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) writer of the modern age had the opportunity to taste the power of film ever-so briefly at the dawn of cinema and lamented that such a mode of expression became available to him far too late in his life. He saw the potential in movies to take his own mode of expression so much further than he believed his writing allowed him. Though he experimented with achieving a three dimensional scope in his drama on the stage, it was cinema where he saw the most potential to present what words were incapable of expressing alone - a medium where words could be translated into a universal, visual language with drama, poetry, scope and life itself. Not just "physical" life, but the spiritual elements that also comprise the very being of existence.

When Tolstoy's great philosophical work "What is Art?" was finally published to his liking (without state censorship) in 1898, he spoke of the "art of the future" as being one that "will be chosen from among all the art diffused among mankind [and that it] will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, but [that it will] transmit feelings drawing men together in brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite all men."

This "art of the future" indeed became cinema, and Robert Bresson is, without a doubt, one of its high priests. Though he continually claimed to be interested in stripping away unnecessary "adornments", his work is infused with his own brand of adornment - rooted deeply in the language of cinema, but used to its highest degrees.

Diary of a Country Priest is, on its surface, the simple tale of a young priest (Claude Laydu) who takes over his first parish in the village of Ambricourt. Just out of the seminary, he dreams of establishing himself and God's work as a vital part of the provincial community he is plopped into. Plagued with illness and a parish that suspects his intentions (and, in fact, takes advantage of his earnest desire to help), he faces challenges of both the physical and spiritual kind. In spite of this, he refuses to give up and even when he discovers that he is not suffering from an ulcer, or even tuberculosis, but deadly stomach cancer, he faces an even greater challenge in which to commit himself to an overwhelming force greater than himself.

The force of love.

Bresson, of course, understands the beauty of simplicity and how it is a perfect tool to yield layers of complexity. Once again, using primarily non-actors in actual locations, he generates a natural quality that enhances the work, but he does not eschew the power inherent in the medium itself and both uses it and pushes it in order to place us in a genuine state of grace. Bresson's trademark long takes and simple camera set-ups with little or no movement are used here to perfection.

One of the most powerful demonstrations of Bresson's command of cinema occurs when the priest travels to Lille to see a specialist and discovers he's terminally ill. He visits Dufrety (Bernard Hubrenne), an old friend from the seminary who has since given up his vows to set up an apothecary and live with a woman out of wedlock. Dufrety resides in a squalid suite and his common-law wife apologizes for its condition while explaining that she must work long hours as a cleaning lady in order to support her husband and herself as he tries to make his new business get off the ground.

In what must be one of the most extraordinary shots in movie history we begin just after the priest has entered the suite. He stands at the bed. Fatigued, he sits. The camera moves into a close head and shoulders shot of the priest. Eventually Dufrety moves into the shot and the camera pulls back a bit to allow for a gorgeously composed two-shot. When Dufrety leaves the frame, the camera slowly moves back to the head and shoulders position on the priest. At one point, there is a jarring jerk of the camera as the priest gets a stab of pain. The camera moves in even closer and fades to black, almost iris-like upon the look of horror and despair that wracks the priest's visage.

This entire shot lasts just over three minutes - with no cuts whatsoever. The "content" of the shot is primarily Dufrety explaining his woeful situation and dismissing his common-law wife, complaining that "she counts for nothing" in his "intellectual life". One of the few times the priest speaks in this sequence which is, essentially, a monologue from Dufrety, is the devastatingly heart-felt revelation that if he, like Dufrety, had broken his vows, he'd "rather it had been for love of a woman" than for what Dufrety calls his "intellectual life".

This is cinema at its highest level.

We have a central character, who has been besieged with all manner of ill-will from his parish (in spite of his efforts to be truly helpful) and has had more than several reasons to question his own faith and yet, his steadfast belief in one thing never changes - that faith and grace are love itself. (His doubts are the hurdles he must surmount in order to successfully attain this goal.) Here, within this dramatic sequence, which takes place entirely in one shot focused upon the priest, we see a man wracked with unbearable physical pain. However, and in spite of this, he reveals that his faith in love has not left him - that the spirit of God, his own spirit, is firmly committed to the notion that love is the ultimate spirit that embraces all.

To say this is one of the most moving, heartbreaking and yet inspirational dramatic sequences in all of cinema is, frankly, an understatement. Bresson's mise-en-scene is exactly the right way to capture the dramatic and thematic concerns of the film and its central character.

Indeed, through much of the film, there is no love. His favourite pupil at Catechism (Martine Lemaire) makes a point of learning her scripture in order to mock him and hurt his feelings. The daughter (Nicole Ladmiral) of a philandering count (Jean Riveyre) whom he tries to show kindness to spreads vicious rumours about him. And in a key sequence, when the priest attempts, in spite of the physical pain coursing through his body to offer spiritual healing to the heartbroken wife of the count (Marie-Monique Arkell), he discovers that one day after accepting the Holy Spirit back in her life, she dies.

Diary of a Country Priest is spiritual and, in its own way, a deeply religious experience, BUT without dogma and rendered in a fashion that comes closest to a drama of life itself. Possibly because of Bresson's own personal interest in the Calvinist influence upon Catholicism via Jansenism (a movement that was grudgingly tolerated, but eventually deemed heretical by the Catholic Church) was he so inspired to make a movie about faith that questioned the tenets of organized religion and furthermore, placed emphasis on a PERSONAL acceptance of predestination and the importance of finding divine grace in love.

Bresson's need to strip away conventional cinematic storytelling adheres very closely to Tolstoy's interpretation of early Christian appreciation for art. According to Tolstoy, Christians who accepted the teachings of Christ, but "not in the perverted, paganised form in which it was accepted subsequently" were also not tolerant of "plastic representations" - especially when they were purely "symbolical" - or, in a bit of interpretive paraphrasing, when art resorted to archetypes or stereotypes.

Bresson takes his characters and places them within a careful, delicate mise-en-scene that allows for a narrative and thematic purity. The title character, not only by his words and actions, but by the manner in which Bresson assembles his shots, cuts and forward movement, comes ever-closer to the spiritual notion of INDIVIDUAL faith.

In fact, Tolstoy points to the very religion and tainted atmosphere that Bresson's priest finds himself within. Tolstoy, especially in how it relates to art, condemns the "New" Christianity as one that "did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity", that being "the immediate relationship of each man to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all men, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence."

This places Bresson's title character squarely within the context of a religion that Tolstoy insists is "contrary" to Christ's teachings and firmly rooted in a false "heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, and not only of these divinities themselves, but also of their images, it made blind faith in the Church and its ordinances the essential point of its teaching."

This is what our Country Priest faces - in himself, his colleagues and his parish. What he must discover, what perhaps we ALL must discover is in the simple words which end the priest's life (over the iconic image - in shadow, no less - of the crucifix).

"What does it matter?" asks our Country Priest before definitively proclaiming, "All is grace."

And so it is.

"Diary of a Country Priest" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. "Diary of a Country Priest" is also available on a stunning Criterion Collection DVD. This is definitely worth owning, but only AFTER or in TANDEM with seeing the picture ON A BIG SCREEN - ON FILM.

"Diary of a Country Priest" is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Sunday February 12 at 4:00 PM and Saturday March 3 at 4:00 PM.

To order tickets and read Quandt's fabulous program notes, visit the TIFF website HERE.

To read my opening tribute to Bresson and this series, feel free to visit The Robert Bresson Man-Cave™ HERE. I am reviewing every film Bresson ever made. In case you missed it, my review of "A Man Escaped" is HERE, my review of "Pickpocket" is HERE and my review of "Mouchette" is HERE.

MOUCHETTE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Robert Bresson's devastating portrait of a teen girl struggling for her own voice amidst the repression, sexism and misogyny of a small town has few equals. "Mouchette" is part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson as organized/curated by legendary film programmer/curator James Quandt.

Mouchette (1967) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Paul Hebert, Marie Cardinal, Jean Vimenet

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Thank heaven for little girls
for little girls get bigger every day!

Thank heaven for little girls
they grow up in the most delightful way!

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
one day will flash and send you crashin' thru the ceilin'

Thank heaven for little girls
thank heaven for them all,
no matter where no matter who
for without them, what would little boys do?

Thank heaven... thank heaven...
Thank heaven for little girls!

Lyrics from the Vincente Minnelli/Arthur Freed
1958 MGM film musical Gigi,
Sung by Maurice Chevalier
with Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner
and Music by Frederic Lowe

I detailed my knee-jerk assessment of French cinema whilst reviewing Pickpocket, citing a general Gallic preponderance towards dipsy-doodle whimsy, unbearably overwrought comedy, lavishly dull costume drama and pretension (mostly via Godard). I pointed to the salient exception to the rule - crime pictures and thrillers. With Mouchette, another exception to my gross generalization is cinema dealing with childhood - not the magic, per se, but the devastation and dashed dreams.

The typical anchors for this are Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (wherein the young Antoine Doinel experiences the hypocrisies inherent in adults around him) and Louis Malle's heartbreaking Au Revoir Les Enfants (wherein a young boy loses his best friend to extermination in Auschwitz).

Perhaps only Russian cinema paints a bleaker portrait of childhood than the French (Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood is especially traumatic), but when it comes to presenting horrendous tales of the FEMALE experience in childhood, the French have EVERYONE beat all to hell. Films that spring immediately to mind are Rene Clement's Forbidden Games (wherein a little girl is orphaned in wartime, finds a family and friend she loves and eventually loses it to be swallowed up in the faceless hordes of the displaced), Jacques Doillon's Ponette (wherein a four-year-old girl tries desperately to come to terms with the death of her mother) and the Francis Mankiewicz masterpiece of French-Canadian cinema Les Bons Debarras (which focuses on a twelve-year-old-girl amidst the poverty of backwoods pur laine white trash).

The indisputable winner in the utterly depressing portrait of young womanhood in French (and perhaps all) Cinema is none other than - you guessed it - Robert Bresson's Mouchette.

And it's a great film!

Detailing the life of fourteen-year-old Mouchette (Nadine Nortier), Bresson pulls out all the stops and the movie bursts the despair-o-meter right off the charts. Set in a small provincial village, the title character is clearly out-of-step with everyone who lives there. Not that this is a bad thing since everyone in the town represents the lowest order of humanity. Her father (Paul Hebert) is a mean, abusive drunk. Her mother (Marie Cardinal) is dying and barely hides her contempt for Mouchette, fearing she'll lose a nursemaid to herself and her baby.

Mouchette has no friends at school - the prissy girlies are rotten, cliquish and so mean to her that she delights in hiding in a ditch and hurling balls of dirt at them. Her teachers hate her - probably because she's smarter than they are - and pays scant attention to their lazy, uninspired dronings. She receives further physical abuse at the hands of these crones.

Even more horrendous is a sequence where Mouchette becomes lost in the woods during a rainstorm and witnesses a violent dispute between a poacher (Jean-Claude Guilbert) and a warden (Jean Vimenet) - one which, ironically, has nothing to do with poaching, but the two mens' idiotic romantic rivalry for the town's homely barmaid. The poacher, thinking he's killed the warden, discovers Mouchette, lures her into his shelter to convince her into providing an alibi, has a violent epileptic seizure, is nursed back to consciousness by the little girl and once he's up to snuff, he rapes her.

Bresson presents a world completely lacking in happiness or compassion. He presents it unflinchingly and with his trademark simplicity, the effect of this narrative is pure devastation. One sequence involves Mouchette find a tiny oasis from the drudgery of life when a carnival comes to town. She manages to get enough money to try the bumper cars and in a freewheeling few minutes of joy, she experiences complete abandon. She not only gets out her frustrations behind the wheel of the bumper car, but catches the eye of a sweet young man. When she follows him to a shooting gallery and is on the verge of perhaps making a friend, her father charges into the scene, strikes her brutally, calls her a slut and drags her back to the outdoor cafe where he sits and boozes.

Bresson presents no easy answers or explanations for this horrid world. It is displayed for all its ugly worth. One hopes (against hope, I'm afraid) that there will be some escape for poor little Mouchette. Alas, escape proves to be a solution of finality and we're left with nothing but the feeling that we live in a world of darkness and ignorance.

Frankly, I believe we do. Those who would benefit from a film like Mouchette will never see it. Those of us who do, live in a rarified world. We are a minority in a sea of humanity, fouled and polluted by ignorance and stupidity. Our title character has it worst than most of us. She is an individual and has no desire to graze, sheep-like, amongst the rest - AND, she's a woman.

Mouchette is a tragedy - one in which childhood is just a brief, painful rite of passage where innocence is blackened upon birth. The Hollywood perception of France (and by extension, the world) which is presented in the MGM musical Gigi, delivers the sentiment via everyone's favourite stereotypical Frenchman Maurice Chevalier when he sings the famous Lerner/Lowe song "Thank Heaven For Little Girls". He croons, in his blithe bon-vivance, that little girls, their "ittle eyes so helpless and appealing", "grow up in the most delightful way".

For Mouchette, and frankly, for all humanity, nothing could be further from the truth.

"Mouchette" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. "Mouchette" is also available on a stunning Criterion Collection DVD. This is definitely worth owning, but only AFTER or in TANDEM with seeing the picture ON A BIG SCREEN - ON FILM. "Mouchette" is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Saturday February 11 at 7:00 PM and Wednesday February 29 06:30 PM. To order tickets and read Quandt's fabulous program notes, visit the TIFF website HERE. To read my opening tribute to Bresson and this series, feel free to visit The Robert Bresson Man-Cave™ HERE. I am reviewing ever film Bresson ever made. In case you missed it, my review of "A Man Escaped" is HERE and my review of Pickpocket is HERE.

PICKPOCKET - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Robert Bresson delivers another masterpiece with this cold, calculatingly meticulous crime picture. "Pickpocket" is part of the continuing TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of the complete works of Robert Bresson as organized & curated by legendary film programmer/curator James Quandt.

Pickpocket (1959) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Laymarie, Dolly Scal, Jean Pélégri, Kassagi, Pierre Étaix

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Okay, I know this is a horrible generalization, but I'll take the plunge anyway. French movies usually drive me up a wall. I hate it when they're whimsical (Phillippe de Broca's King of Hearts or, God help us, anything by Jean Pierre Jeunet), or when they try to be funny (the annoyingly whimsical Jacques Tati, anything starring the overwrought rubber-faced Louis De Funes and virtually every French comedy from the late 70s to early 90s and often remade as equally detestable Hollywood hits), or when they trot out their horrendous historical dramas (in recent years almost always directed by the lead-footed Jean-Paul Rappeneau) and, of course, anything from the pretentious Jean-Luc Godard.

So this is a generalization and tremendously unfair, but for whatever reason, the aforementioned gives me enough ammunition to blame the French for everything. French movies I detest are so numerous that the thought of having to watch them forces me to conjure up images of cheese-gobbling, wine-slurping, beret-adorned, effete aesthetes of the most ridiculous kind - inflicting their dipsy doodlings upon us with carefree abandon.

What I really look forward to, though, are French crime pictures and thrillers. For me, they can almost do no wrong here (save for Godard, who alternately gives me headaches AND a sore ass). Jean Pierre Melville (Bob Le Flambeur), Claude Chabrol (Le Boucher), Henri Georges Clouzot (Diabolique) and even the boneheaded (but stylish) Luc Besson (Leon the Professional) have served up - time and time again - thrills, scares and existential criminal activity that turn my crank like there's no tomorrow.

Most importantly, I worship the ground Robert Bresson walks upon.

With this in mind, his astonishing Pickpocket delivers EVERYTHING I could want from the French - Bresson AND crime.

Yeeeeeee-haaaaaaa!!!!!

Bresson, of course, is all about breaking the rules and flouting convention. Pickpocket is no exception to this tradition. What's most phenomenal about Bresson, is that when he's working within a genre framework, he clearly understands the rules and grammar of cinematic language so well that he's able to veer into dangerous territory and do so in such a way that the work is not only fresh, but still delivers the necessary frissons genre pictures need in order to deliver the goods. Like his WWII P.O.W. picture A Man Escaped, Pickpocket is rife with both atmosphere and suspense - both of which soar due to his rule-breaking that places an emphasis on touches so profoundly real that he plunges us deeply into the worlds and minds of his characters in ways most other directors can only TRY to do.

Pickpocket follows the adventures of Michel (Martin La Salle), a sensitive young man who could do anything with his life - he's clearly sharp-witted and intelligent, but when he discovers his talent for picking pockets, he attacks this pursuit with an almost fundamentalist zeal. His mother (Dolly Scal) is dying in poverty and he seeks to redress this situation by stealing. That said, he's so ashamed of his prowess at stealing that he finds it hard to face his mother and leaves her in the more than capable hands of the beautiful Jeanne (Marika Green), a neighbour and caregiver to the old woman.

His best friend Jacques (Pierre Laymarie) is aware of Michel's criminal activities and desperately tries to sway him on the right path, but instead, he strikes up a working relationship to with two sleazy accomplices (Kassagi and Pierre Étaix) who not only assist him, but provide additional tutelage so he can become even more brilliant at deftly removing money from the wallets of all manner of marks - mostly in crowded subways (a la Samuel Fuller's classic noir picture Pickup on South Street).

Add to this mix, a cat and mouse game he plays with a police inspector (Jean Pélégri) and it all adds up to a classic crime picture. Bresson's approach to material, an approach that might have been hackneyed in less capable hands, yields a movie that is so original that it feels like a clutch of syrup-laden maraschino cherries on a nice hot fudge ice cream sundae.

Bresson never appears to use any closeups, or for that matter, a sparing use of wide shots. Almost the entire film is framed in medium shots - allowing for a consistent visual treatment that works ever-so beautifully with the perverse cutting style which avoids cutting on action, but does so before or after action. This allows for a deliberate pace that renders the pickpocketing sequences unbearably suspenseful and also makes the pleas of those who love him all the more powerful. In a sense, the audience almost becomes a part of the Greek chorus of those who would have Michel walk the straight and narrow.

This, in a nutshell, is very cool.

Bresson's approach also captures the world and atmosphere with utter perfection. Everything from the cafes, to Michel's austere apartment, the racetracks, the crowded subways and his mother's death room all have the unmistakeable whiff of real life. They're not stylized in the usual fashion of crime films - no baroque, noir-ish qualities here. He shoots it all straight on and in this fashion, creates both consistency in his mise-en-scene, but a world that never feels manufactured.

This is the beauty of Bresson, of course. He doesn't want to overtly manipulate the proceedings, but in his austerity he does indeed, like all great filmmakers - manipulate AND manufacture.

Is it any surprise that redemption, of some kind, is just around the corner? And, given the film's indebtedness to Dostoyevsky, the redemption is not overburdened with the usual tropes of morality. Morality hovers just above the surface, but doesn't actually get in the way of the picture's emotional and narrative trajectory. Immoral behaviour is, frankly, a lot of fun to experience - at least vicariously - and Bresson does not deny us this simple pleasure. He just does it in ways that no other directors have ever been able to successfully master in quite the same way.

Pickpocket is a corker of a crime picture and because Bresson infuses it with his unique voice, it's not only a fine bedfellow with the best of Chabrol, Clouzot and Melville, but occasionally astral-projects itself above the mutual resting place of the aforementioned.

Robert Bresson strikes again.

Pickpocket is a great picture and one that served as a huge inspiration to all the crime pictures that followed it.

Oh, and just for fun, watch Pickpocket back-to-back with Paul Schrader's American Gigolo and you'll be plunged into movie-geek Heaven.

"Pickpocket" is part of the TIFF Cinemtheque's major retrospective organized and curated by the legendary programmer James Quandt. Aptly titled "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson", this and every other Bresson film is unspooling at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and over a dozen cinemas across North America. "Pickpocket" is also available on a stunning Criterion Collection DVD. This is definitely worth owning, but only AFTER or in TANDEM with seeing the picture ON A BIG SCREEN - ON FILM. "Pickpocket" is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday February 10 at 6:30 PM and Thursday March 1 at 8:45 PM. To order tickets and read Quandt's fabulous program notes, visit the TIFF website HERE. To read my opening tribute to Bresson and this series, feel free to visit The Robert Bresson Man-Cave™ HERE.