Il diavolo probabilmente...

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).

Robert Bresson's penultimate film, THE DEVIL, PROBABLY definitely is one of his less appreciated work, at the age of 76, his structurally rigid study of a young generation's disillusion and voluntary ostracism towards the society comes off as an aloof, poker-faced but penetrating treatise about ultimate taedium vitae as the zeitgeist of its time, and invites rumination afterwards.

A pre-announced death of a young man Charles (Monnier), leaving a question mark hovering above viewer's head, is it a suicidal case or actually a murder, the picture jumps forwards six months earlier, then steadfastly guides us into Charles' self-rejected life philosophy and the activities happening around him and his friends. Barely any figure of an older generation exists in the story, Charles has a sharp mind (he is good at maths), and alternately stays with two girlfriends: a more sensitive Alberte (Irissari) and a more freewheeling Edwige (Carcano). Meanwhile, a common friend Michel (Maublanc) falls for Alberte and stands by her side each time she feels insecure in Charles' absence.

Charles in not afraid to die, but suicide is something he detests, like politics, religions and the world itself where vice and cruelty are rampant, he refuses to interfere with the world he lives in, and nobody can inveigle him into giving up his belief. As he tauntingly reveals his thought to the psychoanalyst (Hanrion), the pleasure of despair, derived from his no-action, is the sole reason why he lives, once that fades away, there is only one egress for him.

Bresson integrates documentary footages apropos of environmental damage caused by human activities and its repercussion (rickets in Japan after nuclear radiation) into the disjointed narrative, a tough scene, where one can see a seal being battered on its head by a man, and also the montages of trees being felled, monotonously remind us of our sinful acts, 40 years and so on, to this day, the situation only aggravates, that's the main reason why some of us are so pessimistic towards the world.

Employing non-professional young actors and firmly fixating his frame on the lower part of the bodies, the film itself is just like Charles, detached but dogged, and as fearless as him, lectures us about a radical but possibly influential ideology, whether resonance can be induced or not.

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.

The main character in this movie, who is 'more intelligent than the other ones' is confronted with political, psychoanalytical and religious gibberish, the misuse of scientific discoveries for the fabrication of deadly weapons (atomic bombs), economic (unrestrained growth, drugs) and environmental (pesticides) catastrophes, ridiculous police interventions and relational difficulties (real love is impossible).

Faced with a devastating human habitat, the 'hero' of the film can only choose the ultimate solution, in the ancient way. This movie (a formidable uppercut) should not only be characterized as a masterpiece, but above all, as a very serious wake-up call for all human beings, and, in the first place, for its fundamentally diabolic masters. For Robert Bresson, man himself is the devil, and not probably. His destructive actions are nothing less than a global planetary suicide. A must see.

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.