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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
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The Devil, Probably (1977)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Bresson's The Devil, Probably presents such an uncompromising investigation into the causes of a young man’s suicide that, for some, the film will be nigh impossible to watch, let alone enjoy. Cinema rarely achieves the brutal honesty of this film. For the film's exploration of its young protagonist’s condition, Bresson never portrays him as either a victim or a martyr. Bresson lets the events of the story unfold as lucidly as they would in a documentary, allowing the audience to decide for itself. Antoine Monnier stars as Charles, a young man of perhaps 19 or 20 (when we see Charles order a drink at a cafe we wonder if he’s old enough) who is completely at odds with society and its bourgeois expectations. Charles is brilliant (a genius at math), but when the film begins, most of what others — most notably his two girlfriends — have found lovable is already gone. Alberte (Trina Irissari) leaves her author/environmental activist boyfriend Michel (Henri De Maublanc) for Charles, but her love is more maternal than anything else, and she remains platonic friends with Michel. Edwige (Laelita Carcano) is already bored with Charles’ descent into depression as the film starts and is in a complex relationship with a bookstore owner (who has a past with Alberte as well). |
The Devil, Probably |
Charles sees society as a bourgeois dead end and lapses into a state of inertia that distresses his friends. Michel tries to show Charles, via his environmental activism, that it is still possible to be optimistic about society, but Charles wants no part of it. He similarly rejects leftist politics and the hope of the much touted "revolution," sees no future in the youths that pay him to do their math homework, and takes heroin by the banks of the Seine.
Charles spends a night at a church in the search for salvation and inspiration with his drug-addicted pal Valentin (Nicolas Deguy) but is arrested after Valentin robs the Church’s collection boxes for drug money. Finally, Charles goes to a psychiatrist on Edwige’s advice.
His only illness, he tells the hack analyst, is that he sees things too clearly. He realizes his own superiority and refuses to capitulate to a society motivated, it seems, solely on profit. The analyst, however, ascribes Charles’ problems all to a childhood spanking incident, refusing to take him seriously. Charles buys a revolver from a river bank hippie, rouses Valentin out of bed, takes a subway to the Pere Lachaise cemetery (where everyone from Chopin to Jim Morrison is buried), and has Valentin shoot him.
Depressing? Of course it is. To see how Hollywood might tackle a similar subject look no further than Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning film about another troubled math genius. In that wretched little movie, non-conformity is treated as being wholly curable, but in Bresson’s more lucid view of humanity, things are never so simple. That the pressures of modern society eventually crush some should not come as a surprise to anyone, and while we anticipate Charles’ death from the very opening of the film, it still shocks us. We know Charles cannot find salvation, and we know there will be no eleventh hour epiphany. Nonetheless, his death is so cold and ultimately so meaningless that it qualifies as a tragedy. This is a tough, tough work of art.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.