[It] is only in the last century that heroes like Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel, Yury Zhivago and the priest of Journal d'un Curé de Campagne have regularly emerged. They are from novels in which the hero is an analysable combination of artistic creation, autobiography and public confessional. The task of deciding whether the author is commentating, revealing or committing becomes almost impossible. This is particularly true of Journal d'un Curé de Campagne, written in diary form as a purely first person narrative…. Bernanos has foresaken the advantages of distance for the equally great advantages of intimacy…. The limitations of the structure of the novel reduces its meaning to ambiguities; Bernanos gives us no indication of the way he feels about the priest.

The film provides an ideal solution to this problem. Bresson chose a most unfilmlike form in which the priest reads for long periods out of his...