Decades ago Robert Bresson turned a great novel by Georges Bernanos—Diary of a Country Priest—into a great film (1950).

Is there suffering in the priestly life?  There can be, yes—plenty of it—and there is for the country padre (Claude Laydu) in this work.  Along with being dissatisfied with himself and his service to God, he has come down with stomach cancer.  Apropos of service to God, the priest is put to the test by people who are far from the Lord, by rebels, albeit a rebel like Chantal (Nicole Ladmiral) suffers too.  Like the priest, she is rejected.

In any event, the world does not understand the Christian.  Even in a country village a priest is but a stranger and a pilgrim, to use biblical language.  But locations in what is (in various ways) a cancer-ridden world do not matter, for Grace, the film tells us, is everywhere.

(In French with English subtitles)

Diary of a Country Priest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mean Girls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To me, Mean Girls (2004), which is ten years old this year, contains too much plot, but that’s not much of a fault.  What’s more, the third time I saw it I thought the jokes were inadequately paced, but with a fourth viewing I realized they actually aren’t.  So Tina Fey’s farce is delightfully watchable, an effective Hollywood comedy for once.  Fey knows how to write one-liners—edgy, politically incorrect ones—and Mark Waters’s direction never drags them down.  Plus the actors’ delivery of them is flawless. 

A certain cognitive dissonance is created because Lindsay Lohan, the movie’s star, is likable, rather sweet, and we never would have expected the moral meltdown we later got from her.  Her acting is spot-on, bearing the kind of pull that makes us miss her when she’s not on screen.

Crazed Fruit is a Japanese film about young people living in Japan at the time the picture was made: the mid-1950s.

Predictably, the kids here distrust their elders and are cynical about their country.  Rather than being instruments of the change they think there ought to be, however, they merely do what is ordinary in every young person’s life:  they fall in love.  That is to say, Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) falls for perfidious 20-year-old Eri (Mie Kitahara), who is all but stolen from him by Haruji’s older brother Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara), and it all goes very badly.  The fruit of all this love is crazed; hence the film’s title.

Vigorous and disturbing, CF was directed, not always conventionally, by Ko Nakahira and written by Shintaro Ishihara.  The direction produces a film which is just as much a work of art as Rashomon or Tokyo Story.  Its images are as steely as a bayonet.

(In Japanese with English subtitles)

The notorious French film about two overgrown boys, worthless, who would rather steal than work and whose toys are women, Going Places (1974) has something to say about the spiritual and emotional  malnourishment whose results are degradation and drift.  But in addition to having a precarious screenplay, the film has a writer-director, Bertrand Blier, who can’t quite hide his basic misogyny any more than he wishes to hide footage of objectionable excess.

Blier is excessive about three things:  female stupidity, sex, and—remember the French actress Miou-Miou, who’s in this movie?—showing Miou-Miou’s naked breasts.  It’s an early Seventies film, all right.

(The photo is of Bertrand and Miou-Miou)

Jack Bauer is back—because the Fox program, 24, is back—still hard to take but meaning well.

The first of twelve 2014 episodes is set in London, where Chloe is virtually hanging out with the Clockwork Orange bunch and, withal, must be rescued from torture by Jack.  The authorities, you see, have it in for both Jack and Chloe (again Bauer is in hiding), but no matter:  Jack has a POTUS to save on British soil.  And then some.

Keifer Sutherland doesn’t seem to have his heart in this episode, but maybe that will change.  In any event, the same old suspense and implacable drama (not always involving action) are there.  The characters hold us too.  A real go-getter of a female agent (Yvonne Strahovski) is nearly frantic to arrest “culprit” Jack.  Let’s hope the acceptable fun continues.

Jack Bauer (Photo credit: Victor Bracco)