The Devil Probably
1977, directed by Robert Bresson
It’s not usually worth talking about creative risk in a movie. If a film appears daring, it might just as well be aimed at a daring audience, so it’s hard to guess at a filmmaker’s calculations. Nevertheless, in The Devil Probably, Robert Bresson must have been aware of a precarious chance he was taking, because everything hangs on a single, almost trivial moment. If the audience overlooks the importance of that moment, the whole effect will be nearly opposite to what it should be.
The moment is near the end, in Père Lachaise Cemetery, right before Valentin fatally shoots Charles. Charles has hired his drug-addicted friend to pull the trigger which he couldn’t manage to pull on himself, making the act a form of assisted suicide. When he’s about ready, Charles says, “I thought at a time like this I’d have sublime thoughts.” His lack of sublime thoughts so far is consistent with the bleak world the film has portrayed, but as Valentin raises the pistol, Charles continues speaking: “Shall I tell you…?” The sentence is never finished. He’s dead.
Until this moment Charles has lived as if he cared for nothing beyond the immediate demands of his body. Most of his friends are scarcely different, and the greater society around them reflects this lack of concern. Charles’ father is a land developer, constantly pulling trees down, as we witness in a montage of deforestation. Documentary inserts remind us that humans are spoiling the earth, polluting the sky and oceans, slaughtering wildlife, covering the planet with garbage, ruining landscapes, and testing atomic bombs that can kill tens of millions of people at once. The film is unremittingly bleak, and it would be hard to argue that Bresson hasn’t given up on the world.
As upsetting as the documentary footage may be, smaller acts of carelessness have a more immediate effect. Michel tosses a box of chocolates into oncoming traffic. While robbing the alms box in a church, Valentin lets most of the coins fall to the floor, lazily collecting in his pockets only what he can easily grab. Charles visits a psychoanalyst who irresponsibly suggests the method of suicide that will work for him. There’s something reflexively maddening about these moments, a bit like the scene in Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent when the family cuts up their life savings and flushes the bills down the toilet.
The Devil Probably opens with a sightseeing boat gliding up the Seine at night. The shot is too dark to offer much in the way of beauty, but it might evoke Henry Mancini’s romantic song on a similar boat in Charade. Instead, it’s the darkness rather than the boat that the film will embrace. The young characters keep coming back to the riverbank, but the framing consistently excludes every trace of the beauty that anyone remotely familiar with Paris must know is all around them. There’s scarcely a moment of beauty in the whole film, except possibly for the church organ whose pipes are being tuned during a meeting, and which answers the human words below with decisive but phatic syllables like the voice of God making his presence felt in a world that doesn’t care.
The film is systematic in representing the world’s carelessness. Charles and his friends pay visits to the spheres of politics, religion, commerce, science, and psychology as they attend a rally, a church, a bookstore, a physics class, and a psychoanalyst’s office, each place characterized by its own startling lack of care. It’s in the public sphere, however, on a city bus, that the words of the title are spoken: “Who is it that is making a mockery of humanity?” “Yes, who is leading us by the nose?” “The devil, probably.” For a movie title, there’s something strangely tentative about the word “probably”. The uncertainty of this word leaves a tiny opening, a keyhole that the film will eventually unlock.
Bresson’s usual method, in films spanning at least four decades, is to say something about a positive quality in humanity through its absence. For instance, Au hasard Balthazar shows a world devoid of grace except in one character who happens to be a donkey. Similarly, not quite everyone in The Devil Probably lives without caring. Charles’ friend Michel works for the Association for the Conservation of Man and His Environment, and he seems devoted to its cause. Alberte shows simultaneous care and disregard for Charles and Michel, both of whom she’s dating, but care is ambiguous in the context of sexual relations. The film’s action opens with Valentin examining the shoes of four unidentified friends to diagnose whether they walk properly. If “walking properly” is a metaphor, we can gather that one out of four persons will embody virtue, and Michel is correspondingly one of the four main friends.
One out of four is fairly bleak, though, and if there’s a redeeming keyhole in this film, it’s not going to be Michel, who drops out for the last thirteen minutes. The Devil Probably is so overwhelmingly negative that critics tend to read it as an indictment of modern society, but if that’s all it is then we have to believe that Bresson has become uncharacteristically didactic. All the documentary footage leaves little room for interpretation, and unless we’re ready to accept that the director has suddenly abandoned his own methods, we have to consider that he might be working against the despair that he depicts so forcefully.
Part of the answer might be in the Christlike portrayal of Charles, but that too presents difficulties. His long hair and his charisma suggest a Christ figure, and the latter half of the film is a sequence of parallels to the final hours of Christ’s life, starting with perfunctory shots of a meal at a long table with bread and wine, whose sole purpose seems to be to suggest a Last Supper. Like Judas, Valentin takes coins (and paper francs) before killing his friend; the youths gather by a wooded stream (the Garden of Gethsemane) where police come to arrest some of them; and the doctor’s allusion to “the ancient Romans” connects the action to the time of Christ. The map at the Metro station suggests a Road to Calvary, and the glass of brandy is like the sponge soaked in vinegar. Charles’ death, like Christ’s, is a voluntary submission to murder, and it happens in a place marked by crosses.
Taken together, all these signs can hardly be coincidental, yet it’s probably easier to read Charles as an anti-Christ. He declares to Dr. Mime that he hates life, and he says that “Charity degrades the donor as much as the recipient,” which is about as un-Christlike as one can get.
Now we come to the film’s keyhole, the single detail on which Bresson has staked everything, and on which all hopes for a constructive understanding rest. At the moment Charles is about to die, he reaches out to Valentin: “Shall I tell you…?” What matters here is not what’s left unsaid, but the very fact of reaching for a human connection when it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. When Valentin cuts him short it’s another maddening instance of careless waste, but we can also believe there’s a certain tragic inertia in the timing of the shot. The important thing is that for once, when he reaches the limit of his life, Charles cares about something, and the implication is huge. The Devil Probably tells us that underneath all of humanity’s iniquity and nihilism, we inevitably do care. It’s built into our natures to care, and this fact can potentially save us from the horrors we’ve seen in all the documentary clips earlier.
The comparison to Christ therefore has an unexpected meaning. It’s not that Charles is exceptional in any way. On the contrary, he’s an arrogant Raskolnikov-like character who says “I’m perfectly aware of my superiority.” His likeness to Christ, rather, is symbolic. Just as Christ, in the Christian faith, saved mankind from sin through his death, Charles’ example points us, albeit unwittingly, to the key that might save both humankind and the environment.
If critics still regard The Devil Probably as an expression of despair, or as a film without a constructive aim, then Bresson’s gamble did not succeed. To stake the entire understanding on a single incomplete sentence was certainly risky, as viewers are usually unprepared for such a great leap of logic, but those final four words do not act alone. Bresson gives us guideposts to help us reach the all-important conclusion, not least of which is the parallel to Christ, which should inspire viewers to reconcile those signs with Charles’ un-Christlike character. Also, the walk to the cemetery lays the ground for a proper understanding of the ending.
The cemetery scene is essentially a clash between two ideas, each foreshadowed on the short walk from the bar to the cemetery wall. First is the suicidal idea, the careless notion that nothing matters. Valentin asks where they’re going, and Charles answers that anyplace will do. As they left the bar, Valentin had displayed this same attitude in his readiness to get the act over with, taking the gun out of Charles’ pocket before they reached the privacy of Père Lachaise. Second is the contrary idea that things do matter after all, expressed in Charles’ last words, but also revealed in the middle of the walk when Charles passes an open window. There, from a television set, he hears a few bars of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, and he can’t help stopping to listen. A piece of music may not always be enough to save someone’s life, but it shows us that despite Charles’ professed hatred for life, something in him cries out to participate in existence.
CONNECTIONS:
Diary of a Country Priest – Protagonist’s story parallels the Passion of Christ while lacking an important quality of Christ; object thrown into a fireplace foreshadows a sort of suicide
A Man Escaped – Two characters scaling a wall before an ending with a spiritual double meaning
Pickpocket – Scene(s) of theft focusing on the criminal’s hands; doors left ajar; protagonist fancies himself superior to society
Winter Light – Wordless voice of God personified in a sound effect
Zabriskie Point – Male protagonist walks out of a gathering of radical students at the beginning