Review of First Reformed (2018) by Justin J — 09 Dec 2018

The similarities between Paul Schrader's "First Reformed" and Robert Bresson's 1951 classic "Diary of a Country Priest" are so numerous that they could fill a book. As it turns out, that book's name is "Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, & Dreyer", written by Paul Schrader in 1972.

Schrader's work of course has long been preoccupied with internal strife, sometimes explicitly faith-based (his script for "Last Temptation of Christ"), sometimes not (his script for "Taxi Driver", the style of which Scorsese has explicitly stated was influenced by Bresson). But "First Reformed" feels like the culmination of Schrader's lifelong exploration of the intersection of the material world of film and the inner world of personal metaphysics, derived from what Andre Bazin presciently termed the ontological nature of the photographic image.

The most notable stylistic similarity between "First Reformed" and "Country Priest" involves Schrader's use of what Susan Sontag referred to as Bresson's technique of "doubling" or "tripling": by having a character writing in a diary, describing an event that is then seen, while hearing the character's voice providing an internal narration, an effect is achieved whereby the audience is exposed to a discrete depiction of day-to-day reality two or three times, thus creating an unsettling feeling. Something is amiss, and this supposition then informs and underpins the rest of the unfolding narrative.

Without spoiling the ending, it seems to me that Schrader should be commended for allowing his characters to choose their own destinies, rather than predictably shoehorning them into a narrative conclusion that fits with his own views of our contemporary world. There is something to be said for the palliative quality of love, even in the face of existential futility. The issue of whether or not it is ethically defensible to force others to suffer the consequences of that futility, an issue raised in a rather provocative dialogue early on in "First Reformed", remains, alas, unanswered by film's end.