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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

A wonderful piece of philosophy, this movie portrays the story of a boy named Charles. It uses both film language and words to express his nihilistic thoughts. The atmosphere is grim and often stylised - some scenes are even seemingly theatrical. The story itself is quite simple and I felt that it was not that emphasised, compared to the dialogues and cinematography. It serves this movie and its message well though - Charles' story doesn't matter, nor does anyone else's. What is really timeless, are thoughts and ideas.

"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).

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.

This film is so terrible there are no words in the English language to describe it, which must be why it was made in French. In fact, there are only two French words which apply: 'le neant' ('nothingness') and 'merde.' To roll out a few English adjectives just to give an idea: this film is pretentious, revolting, boring, offensive, empty, worthless, pointless, and one could go on like that for some time. The characters are those typical French spoilt brat university students of the 1970s still in the grip of the horrible Jean-Paul Sartre and his phoney existentialism. They search for meaning in a tepid sort of way (inert, more like it), but of course find none. When you start out by being convinced that nothing has any meaning, and then glance around you just in case you might see some lurking in a dusty corner, you are bound to see nothing there but rubbish. It is inconceivable to me what kind of person could possibly praise this film. Two pseud reviewers from leading newspapers are quoted on the DVD box, and one says this film is 'A masterpiece ... A film that is impossible to forget.' Well, try me.

"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.

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.

No doubt that we are facing a great film, but for me the excess of footsteps noise is a huge drag in enjoying this film. Unfortunately for me, that appears in many other Bresson films. It is not a simple footstep noise, is like some horseshoes in a cathedral that repeats hundreds of times during the film. Ignoring this aspect, it is a great film.

Posted on Letterboxd 30 July 2021.

Maybe I'm just really stupid and biased, but this film was kinda cringey. Admittedly, the dialog was actually pretty enthusing for a short while, plus I can kind of see why people of a certain philosophical persuasion would enjoy it. It's a 3/10 from me. Apologies, film buffs.

I love the french name of this movie. It make it seem the devil is the problem. This movie is different and peculiar. The story is just a work of art. The direction does it justice. It represents nihilism in such a beautiful way showing the aspect of how harsh the reality of the life is. The dialogues are profound and clever(definitely something to look out for).

Acting is so dull and unenthusiastic along with the dialogues delivering in such a way giving them an authentic straight-forward and grim touch which I think is done intentionally to match the vibe of the whole movie.

Cinematography is so artistic. It feels elegant and strong while still maintaining the dark and dull concept around very nicely. Music is spontaneous. Although Music is not main focus of the story but I appreciate the whenever it comes around randomly and heard.

8/10.

Thank you for reading this :)