Le diable probablement

I just saw this film and found it to be one of the best depictions of this century's malaise I've ever seen, viewed through the eyes of the character Charles and his friends.

Charles is a nucleus of concern for his friends Micheal, Alberte, and Edwige. They devote much of their time doting on him and worrying over him, because he cannot find solace in anything...consumerism, environmental destruction, and greed have created a vacuum of disillusionment that these young characters live in, and Charles, above all, sees no way out--he finds this world disgusting, but dying to escape it just as pointless as trying to succeed in it and contribute to it.

Every scene and shot in this film is drained of warmth and vitality. It is as though everyone in the world has succumbed to the acceptance of industrialized mechanization and their own resulting powerlessness. Many shots do not even show the faces of people, just their anonymous bodies walking, their heads cut off. The acting is deliberately minimal and understated. In this drained world, there is never a glimmer of hope depicted for anyone.

But this isn't bad! What makes this film so great, in essence what I think makes much of Bresson's work so powerful, is its simple willingness to show things as they really are. While the others in the film cling to naive hopes for a "revolution," Charles has crossed over to an existential enlightenment of sorts...he fully sees that overthrowing the government or any challenge to authority is useless when it is all of humanity itself that guides and allows for the persistance of a destructive status quo. As he tells the psychologist: "My only problem is that I see too clearly."

And that is a problem, if one doesn't have any means for spiritual sustenance or some way to move on from there...and many people don't. Le Diable probablement makes it clear that for some, there are no institutions, no places in society to ultimately gather strength or support from. Giving up is their only option. As in his film Mouchette, Bresson depicts just this type of person as acheiving almost a state of grace in their refusal to accept what they are expected to accept...and paying the ultimate price for it. While suicide should never be celebrated, the beauty and clarity of the depiction of the mechanisms that lead to the character's suicide in Bresson's films is to be applauded.

****

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.

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).

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.

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).