Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1977, robert bresson, the devil probably
Director: Robert Bresson
The penultimate film of Robert Bresson, The Devil, Probably serves as the antithesis of his most whimsical feature, Four Nights of a Dreamer. An illuminated boat floating down the Seine is the first image to draw this parallel, and later in the picture Bresson returns to a familiar gathering of young folk musicians. Whereas Four Nights of a Dreamer identified the youthful as naive and over-romantic, The Devil, Probably features a protagonist, Charles, whose rigid cynicism sets him in stark contrast with Mouchette, who was resilient for as long as she could bare. Charles’ suicidal desire is not the result of his own victimization, but of his unwillingness to participate in a world in which he finds abhorrent. In the film, Bresson heavily uses stock footage to depict man’s destruction of the natural world. These images do not serve as an environmental sermon, but as a sort of passive judgment – man’s greed permits the potential for change, and so it is the burden of the young to either find a method of coping with the reality, or, as Charles will, removing oneself entirely. The key ideas that Bresson employed in his earlier work – transcendence, grace – are alluded to out of spite. In a sequence within a church, an organ is obnoxiously tuned while characters discuss the nature of religion, and, later, Charles camps in a church as if to become close to God without the contaminate of man. That he is so reasonable and articulate in his bitterness is perhaps what draws some away from the picture, which is certainly one of Bresson’s most uncompromising and upsetting. It is not a glamorization or a justification of suicide, though it certainly doesn’t pass judgment on the doomed Charles for his decision. After all, who are we to judge Charles, when our species as a whole is equally bent on self-destruction?
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