Il diavolo probabilmente...

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.

By this point when Robert Bresson was 77 years old (this would be his penultimate feature before retiring after L'Argent in 1983), he basically had zero damns to give. He had his style that can be best described as making the actors so straight-forward but either repressing or draining any full-on emotions. It's not that the people (all, per usual, non-professional players) don't have souls to look at - I have to imagine or hope that Bresson, if he worked today, would still want the eyes from actual humans and not go for, say, CGI or other processes. It's just that Bresson's de rigeur was getting them to do so many takes that by a certain point it's like 'why try?' But something about The Devil, Probably doesn't quite hit its mark for me as some of his other features.

I think part of it is at the start of the film; though we're given a newspaper clipping - showing the suicide (or was it murder, dun-dun-dun) of a young man named Charles - and then a 'Six Months Earlier' card pops up, it's as if we are plopped right into the middle of the lives of these young people. But because of the not-totally distinctive personalities (they may look slightly distinctive only because this is the 1970's and most of the young men have long hair) it's hard to really get a feel on any one character for the first 15/20 minutes.

We see them go to some political rally and another gathering at a church, though they don't stay long, and a lot of it is exiting and entering places (the foley work of foot-steps, of all things, feels like the thing that most stands out for me, or it was simply distracting in some way I can't fully express why). But who are these people? We finally get to settle in with two male characters and two young women, one of whom, Charles (Monnier), is blonde-haired (kind of a French Kurt Cobain), and he is rather aimless and adrift. He has a girlfriend, Alberte (Irissari), who he might marry, but probably not. From here we see him go to a class here and there to see a lecture on the effects of the bomb, he sees trees being demolished, and he uh... just walks around, possibly thinking about death, not really doing much.

I think a large point of The Devil, Probably, and indeed where the title comes from, is the question of how we can live in a society where calamity and even the apocalypse seem not too far away. The backdrop for these sort-of adrift young people (or at least for Charles) is the constant threat of pollution and the destruction of certain animals (be warned, there's an actual clubbing of a seal shown, not staged, in documentary footage, and a couple of people who are affected by mercury poisoning) and the bomb itself and nuclear issues like plutonium being accessible or something.

The point is, there are some really awful things that make life seem so meaningless, one supposes, and this is the backdrop for Charles to not really give a s*** anymore. Or is it? I think the most effective demonstration is when Charles and his friend Michel are present to see a bunch of trees chopped and falling to the ground. Perhaps this is to say this is death all around, what's the point of anything. But aside from this the pollution-documentary segments feel slightly disconnected from Charles' trajectory, which is gloom and doom. There is some drive to the story as his friends, Alberte especially, want to help him and get him better. Probably the most interesting scene is when Bresson shows Charles being in a conversation with a therapist and we sort of get a sense of where this disillusioned guy's head is at.

But I almost wish this story was in the hands of someone else who could give it some greater emotional feeling. Bresson is the kind of filmmaker who would have an actress cry, but it would be where you see the tears around the eyes or one or two falling down a cheek, but with a placid face and dialog delivered without any outpouring. Maybe that makes it more intense, the holding back, that we the audience can read more into it.

The Devil, Probably does start to get more interesting after the first 15/20 minutes when we can sort of settle into the situations of these characters' lives, how they are smart and intelligent people but in a world that is falling apart without people taking notice (that Devil, Probably line on the bus is an indicator of it). And Bresson is always interesting with the camera as he has a natural way with directing on the technical side. I even get that the film is about seeing "too clearly" in a manner of speaking, that without any sense of, say, the absurd or humor life is an absolute horror and why keep going on and why not do some drugs or wander around.

For me, in this case, unlike some of Bresson's other films, the focus wasn't as clear enough in connecting things until later in the film, and even compared to other leads I didn't find Charles Monnier, quite frankly, that captivating to watch, which is crucial with one of these Bresson non-acting performances (think the young woman in Balthazar or the men in A Man Escaped for comparison).

"For myself, there is something which makes suicide possible - not even possible but absolutely necessary: it is the vision of the void, the feeling of void which is impossible to bear."- Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably, is a powerful cry of despair aimed at a world without values. In this 1977 film Charles, (Antoine Monnier) a young man of about twenty, rebels against society's destruction of the planet and arranges his own death as a protest. What does he want? "I ask nothing", he says, " I lay claim to nothing…If I did anything, then I'd be useful in a world that disgusts me". Bresson describes his work as "a film about the evils of money, a source of great evil in the world whether for unnecessary armaments or the senseless pollution of the environment." The title comes from a scene on a bus when Charles says to his travelling companion that "Governments are shortsighted," and other passengers join in the discussion. One says not to blame governments, "it's the masses who determine events. Someone asks, "So who is it that makes a mockery of humanity? Who's leading us by the nose?" And the first passenger replies with unmistakable irony, "The Devil, probably," and then the bus crashes amidst the cacophony of honking horns.

The film begins and ends in darkness and light is meager throughout. One is not used to color in a Bresson film but here color is almost non-existent and Paris has never looked colder or bleaker. After an illuminated boat pierces the darkness and drifts along the Seine, two newspaper articles are flashed on the screen. Eliminating any suspense, the newspapers announce the death of a young man in Paris, one article says it is a suicide, the other a murder. We then go back six months. The main protagonist, Charles, joins his friends in a meeting about the environment. All of them watch videos of man polluting the environment and scenes of nuclear destruction. They play bongo drums and talk about religion but to no apparent purpose. Each scene is brief and does not last long enough to involve us emotionally.

Charles looks like a typical College student but has the air of insufferable superiority that can only come through righteousness. Physically, he is slender and quite handsome and one does not expect to see an attractive actor as the lead in a Bresson film. He has a nucleus of friends, Michel, Alberte, Eddwige who are concerned about him but he gives little in return, showing no outward emotion and all seem to move about in a catatonic state. Concerned about where Charles seems to be headed, his friends arrange for him to visit a psychiatrist but he tells Dr. Mime (Regis Hanrion) that his problem is only that he "sees things too clearly". He reads from a crumpled brochure in his pocket, telling the doctor what he would lose if he lost his life: family planning, package holidays, cultural, sporting, linguistic, the cultivated man's library, all sports sickness, credit cards, and so forth. The young man says that he is not depressed, that he just wants "the right to be myself. Not to be forced to give up wanting more . . . to replace true desires with false ones based on statistics". In a moment of humor rare for Bresson, the doctor tells Charles that it if he was spanked as a child it is possibly the cause of his feeling crushed by society and asks him, "When it's over, do you see yourself as a martyr?" The reply: "Only an amateur."

On his way to his ultimate protest, the young man hears the sound of a sublime Mozart piano concerto coming from an open window. He stops to listen as if trying to find the source of grace but is denied. When he sees that the music is only coming from a television set, he continues his journey to its inevitable conclusion. The climax, unlike other Bresson films that engender a feeling of spiritual lightness, left me uninvolved, more depressed than moved. When Charles begins to talk about his lack of sublime feelings, he is stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence, unable to explain to the world why he thinks he has run out of options. In the end he gets to be right…dead right. His death, however voluptuous, does not clean up any toxic waste, save the felling of a single tree, or protect the life of one baby seal.

This is cinema. Still holds today. The longevity. If the new generation finds it today they will love it so much. My first film from Robert Bresson and it didnot dissapoint. Isee it as the metaphor to the societal fallout even though we seem to be going on and about just fine, but our society is woven on so small threads that it doesnot take a person to collapse. And collapse of one person is collapse of society. We find lot of temporary solutions and trying to find the thing we want, but when the disgust leaves, the fall is imminent. Loved the film. Perhaps the darker ending makes it better. He finally gets liberated at the end. That is something many people will not consider. While each and every character is still chained to the politics, religion and everything in between. Loved it. Only recommend this to my film mutuals.

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.