Director: Robert Bresson
120 minutes, Black and White, French - English subtitles
Based on the novel by George Bernanos, it is set in a hostile countryside - a bleak Normandy, where a young county priest, a boy, racked by an incurable stomach complaint comes to his first parish. The inhabitants resent, trick and mock their new priest: because of his youth, unworldliness and simplicity. The most startling stylistic innovation of the film is its use of pleonasms - the narrator telling us something while we are actually watching it happen. Bresson pulls you down to the depth of the priest's suffering and refuses to give you a glad hand up.