A Bresson masterpiece finally gets its moment.
It would be amusing if jaded moviegoers thought that this week’s 4K restoration of Robert Bresson’s 1977 The Devil, Probably at Film Forum is part of the onslaught of horror fare dominating movie and TV screens at this precarious time (Agatha All Along, The Deliverance, Never Let Go, The Substance, Last Straw, Apartment 7A, Bagman, Azrael).
Bresson’s film not only has the best title, but his scariness goes deeper. The revival of The Devil, Probably (alongside Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac) brings back Bresson’s artistic focus on the spiritual confusion of modern youth — a subject that deserves deep reflection, not cheap thrills.
The world has finally caught up with the existential crisis that Charles (Antoine Monnier) goes through — hypersensitive to ecological destruction and the sexual mishaps of his peers. Affectless youths with long hair, they have an odd appearance (anxious, small-breasted girls and skinny, sullen boys in suit jackets) that denotes casual attitudes about sex combined with political cynicism and religious doubt.
Mirroring today’s Gen Z crises, The Devil, Probably had to wait several generations for Bresson’s vision to hit home. Its post-hippie, pre-punk setting shows Bresson’s reaction to a society that’s transitioning from idealism to nihilism. Clueless reviewers promoted the film as Bresson’s answer to May 1968 dissent — perspectives that Godard and Resnais had already anticipated in La Chinoise and La guerre est finie respectively.
Now, The Devil, Probably resurfaces during the vogue for outward pathologies, hidden grotesquerie — and the pseudo-intellectual agnosticism of Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. Bresson can’t help making alienation look chic (it comes with his French art-movie demeanor), so Charles and his pals are all lovely yet lost — not a Greta Thunberg or AOC misfit among them. “I proclaim destruction,” says a radical orator, and his disoriented audience (recalling the stoned concert fans in Antonioni’s Blow-Up) isn’t much more animated when contemplating smog, felled forests, noise pollution, oil-tanker effluent, or the cute seals being slaughtered in activist documentaries that are the weak part of Bresson’s societal alarm.
Moral mystery and theological speculation set Bresson apart from slasher-movie schlockmeisters. The stark, edgy yet sensual style is bracing, not spooky. His flashback investigation of Charles’s death (suicide or murder?) in the Père Lachaise cemetery explores the consequences facing a disenchanted generation. That’s what makes this film relevant to the millennium.
Ex-student Charles is a trigonometry wiz, but all the logic in the world can’t prevent his longing for death. He asks psychologist Dr. Mime (Régis Hanrion), “Why should I be useful in a world I despise?” It’s an extension of the atheism that has always fascinated Bresson. Eerie shots of unoccupied chairs in near-empty cathedrals converted into activist spaces complete discussions about the future of Christianity.
Charles wavers between lovers Alberte (Tina Irissari) and Edwige (Laetitia Carcano) and his intellectual rival Michel (Henri de Maublanc), each one finding sex, politics, drugs, and secularism unhelpful. Their dilemmas evoke our disregard of the vacancy in Antifa anarchists and our encouragement of gender dysphoria. Sexual freedom meets spiritual confusion.
Charles mixes pity and hostility in his relationship to Valentin (Nicolas Deguy), a nihilist junkie who robs church collection boxes and becomes the agent of Charles’s fate. Their affinity modernizes Bresson’s classic studies of spiritual struggle amid negative forces (Les dames de Bois de Boulogne and Diary of a Country Priest).
During a climactic Metro-bus sequence, travelers express their thoughts: “Who is it that now makes a mockery of humanity?” “Who’s leading us by the nose?” One passenger opines, “The devil, probably.” Bresson’s Christian morality offers folk wisdom. It is the only movie to answer this century’s panic. The film’s ecological subtext seems negligible; Charles’s fear of thermonuclear war is now a joke, after the worldwide embrace of self-destruction during the Covid apocalypse.
In The Devil, Probably, Bresson explains the predicament of politically indoctrinated hatred — the treacherous behavior of students, politicians, and journalists who ought to know better but do evil anyway. Rather than horror-movie clichés, Bresson offers genius: One activist-believer takes a stand against another’s blasphemous stunt and objects, “God doesn’t reveal Himself through mediocrity.” The title The Devil, Probably accounts for mankind’s failure.