Der Teufel möglicherweise

My Rating : 8/10

With only a 14-film oeuvre, Bresson is undoubtably the most minimalist yet original filmmaker ever to have graced this planet. To me he is the embodiment of purity in all of cinema as his work harrows the soul much deeply than any other filmmaker. Using untrained actors and methodically sculpting their sense of surprise and spontaneity Bresson exploits the interiority of a human being (or animal in the case of 'Au Hasard Balthazar') to be transferred on camera and therefore reveal a flow of visual imagery of 'feeling' which he called 'cinematography' as that is what distinguished cinema from theatre and literature according to him.

Our intellect fools us but our feelings reveal the bitter truths of the world. So when Charles (the young protagonist) says he sees everything 'too clearly' it is because he feels too much and therefore unable to succumb to the industrialised automation around him.

Hopelessness, despair, existentialism - it is all here and it's only purpose is to invite the viewer on a journey of frustration because the frustration is an evolutionary achievement and therefore a necessity (at least according to me...and Bresson).

I just saw Le Diable Probablement this evening, and I really enjoyed it. While some may criticize the film, I thought it to be an extremely creative look into the psychological circumstances of the film's protagonist Charles.

The film was striking in what it doesn't express. The catatonic nature of all the characters is what gives the film its vitality. The sparse and unemotional dialogue, the bland atmosphere, and the visual depictions of the characters themselves capture an emotion quite lost in modern day cinema.

But Bresson is not so simple-minded as to agree with his hero, even though the choice of honorable suicide is certainly heroic (I recall Sophocles' Ajax, whose motives were very similar). No person past a certain degree of spirtual advancement can take others' ideas and suffering at face value and simply side with them or against them, lay out the arguments or counter them one by one like in a game of cards. It is impossible to "argue" any real case, to lift a word from another reviewer here. One simply knows how things are, and beyond the facts faith, stubborn love of life begin. Bresson is dogmatic as someone who has lived and experienced enough and is not going to bother picking small fights with fools. Yet he is also sympathetic - always. He is kind. He shows everywhere great pity for Charles, all the way to the little glimpse of a TV screen that he catches on the way to his half-hearted appointment with death. This is life with its joys, being left behind. And Bresson lets Charles' better-integrated friend say at one point that he feels that despite everything, it's going to be all right.

Does this convince Charles? Of course not, and he consistently parries every other argument made to him, turns away every saving hand. He is in despair, and life is not a philosophy seminar, it is a choice. If one makes the decision to live, it can't be on rational grounds. As Max Stirner wrote, "I have founded my affair on nothing." Charles has standards. Is it wrong to have standards? What is the point of living without standards, indeed? Being young, he exercises the right every person has but most give up: to insist on satisfaction. He wants the world - or the social world, which is only how deep he penetrates - to exist on his intellectual level, not only on the emotional. Charles knows he could make himself "happy" by losing himself in love (strange again: no reviewer took the trouble to think about the significance of all of the romantic back-and-forth here). And he is not opposed to love. But he wants more. He is untrained but fresh, and he demands that the social world be fresh as well. He wants something worth doing, yet there is nothing. Had he stopped idealizing nature he only knows from a projector's screen or the cabin of a car and seen through to its own brutality, he would object to the physical universe generally, because there is nothing worth doing either. Then Charles' objection would grow to a titanic scale. But he is neither Ajax nor Hamlet, only a sad boy.

And this is itself sad, and that he gets himself killed, indifferently shot by someone who has degenerated below humanity and practically turned into another part of the machine is also sad. Everything is sad, and the future that awaits these boyfriends and girlfriends who did not kill themselves is sad too. What will they become? For they will become something. The devil will cook and flip them and make them into train conductors or mechanics or teachers or celebrated novelists. Within a decade of this time they will grow large and slow, rowdy and loud and insistent and ambitious, they will spawn kids and hang diplomas in the offices and eat at veranda restaurants - painting material for some sort of Renoir. The actors were not professionals, and something like this must have happened them - winds of change blown again by the same maw. And what happened to Antoine Monnier? Where did he go with his beautiful hair and soulful eyes, if not forward into the same lousy future that ends the same way?

And here faith comes again in another wave. Trumping cause-and-effect, the devil's invention. Love of humanity shows throughout this picture, Bresson's love, and it's a damn shame that the guy kills himself. Despite the newspaper headlines in the start, I all along rooted for a happy end.

"What prompted me to shoot this film is the waste we have made of everything. It's this mass civilization in which the human being won't exist any more. This mad restlessness. This huge demolition undertaking where we will die where we thought we lived. It's also the astounding indifference from people in general except some young ones who are more lucid".

This is what Robert Bresson declared when his film was released thirty years ago and he surely had good reasons to defend his deeply pessimistic view about the future of the world. It's 1977 and the "thirty-year boom period after World War II" is just over. This golden age of economic, social growth improved many people's lives but also led to grave results like pollution or the nearly extinction of several animal species. Although "le Diable Probablement" was released thirty years ago, the main issues it broaches are still topical ones in 2007 especially with global warming. Could Bresson be a visionary?

Different characters in Bresson's work experienced a cruel, ruthless world, either it is a priest (Journal d'UN Curé De Campagne, 1951), a donkey (Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966) or a little girl (Mouchette, 1967). Here, he puts his camera amid a bunch of teenagers in their twenties something who are horrified with man did to the planet. The strongest points of the work take place during the slide shows when they comment on a neutral voice the damage man caused to the environment. These pictures pack a real wallop and it's impossible not to remain indifferent in front of them. They efficiently serve Bresson's purpose.

But why "le Diable Probabalement" is ultimately underwhelming in Bresson's filmography? These scary pictures are well here to bear witness of the "huge demolition" in which we're trapped but the filmmaker doesn't introduce the causes. They are absent, either they're of social or economical source. That's why we are little convinced and indifferent once these images aren't on the screen any more. And what doesn't help matters is that when the camera lingers on Charles and his friends' everyday life or significant events, these issues of pollution, famine, waste of natural resources seem so far from the filmmaker's main lines that our interest progressively wanes. And the thought that this bunch of teenagers doesn't seem to directly live in this horrible world often springs to mind, except maybe once when Charles and Albert go in a forest and not to see and hear the sound of the trees falling down, the former puts his fingers in his ears.

So, Bresson's film is the victim of a large gap between its purpose and its manner to reach it. It should have gained intensity by being more tightened. Of course, it's a "Bressonian" work to the core with an austere, straightforward directing, "models" who recite their texts and the confrontation of subjective minds with an objective, cruel world but "le Diable Probablement" isn't Bresson's most adequate film to see these features blended to create a big harmonious work. On virtually the same topic, the documentary "an Inconvenient Truth" (2006) is more effectively creepy.

In the sequence when Charles is to the analyst's, at one moment he bends over the shrink's desk and can see a drawer full of checks and notes. This detail could be an indication about the next direction taken by Bresson for his next film: "l'Argent" (1983).

One wonders what really led the French government to ban "Le Diable, Probablement", a film directed by one of French cinema's most admired directors Robert Bresson. It does not have anything to incite young people to commit suicides and participate in riots. The film makes good use of mixing documentary footage with those of a feature film. This technique results in enabling viewers to know more about various actors and their personal motivations. The neutrality of French youth is revealed through the depiction of a simple youth who express intentions of avoiding society in order not to be misled. The title comes from a sentence uttered by a middle-aged man on in a bus. There are a plenty of Bressonian touches in this film about a young man who is liked by two women. However, this is not the only thing which admirers and fans of Robert Bresson can look out to watch. A serious viewer can also watch how the story of a suicide disguised as a murder was revealed on time.