Thursday Movie Picks: Diaries/Journals

 

For the 15th week of 2022 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We go into the world of diary/journals as it play into the perspective of those who recall their own experiences and write them down on something. Sometimes, it play into real-life stories or sometimes an exploration from within. Here are my three picks:

1. Diary of a Country Priest

Robert Bresson’s adaptation of George Beranos’ novel about a priest who goes to a small French town to begin his first parish as its local priest only to be rejected by the congregation. It is a film that explores a young man trying to be accepted but also questions his own devotion to God and himself but also a group of people who feel like he’s doing nothing to help them as they already have enough problems. It is a film that explore a world where faith doesn’t do bring enough help as there’s characters the priest would try to help as he couldn’t find any answers as it is one of Bresson’s quintessential films.

2. Diary of a Chambermaid

Luis Bunuel’s adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel is the first of a series of collaborations with co-writer Jean-Claude Carriere that explores a chambermaid who works for a rich family full of people who are quite cruel as she also has to deal with a strict madam and a political groundskeeper who spouts a lot of nationalist, right-wing, and anti-Semitic rhetoric. The chambermaid, played by Jeanne Moreau, is also this object of affection as she wears these small leather heel-shoes that serves as a turn-on to the elderly house master where Bunuel maintains this air of sexuality as it play into what was taboo in those times.

3. The Motorcycle Diaries

Walter Salles’ film about the journey of a young Che Guevara who goes on a trip from Argentina to travel across South America with his friend Alberto Granado on a motorcycle. It is a film that explore how a young doctor from Buenos Aires with asthma would see things that would make him the man that the world would later know him for. It is a film told with an air of richness of how two men go on a trip from Argentina to Venezuela but also come across other aspects of South America where they both feel the need to change the world as well as ponder some of the things that lead to the way of what the world has become.

© thevoid99 2022