Critics reviews

Was the French New Wave murdered or was it suicide? Regardless, its ashes were scattered in the Seine with The Devil, Probably, the Apocalypse Now of French cinema, itself about the end of the road for a country's national progress. Progressivism, like a moth, feels the punishing zap of nihilism. Godard is nowhere to be found. Truffaut has settled down. Paris is grey and quiet.

Bresson's chilling visions of daily life suggest its hostility toward the passions of youth. The film offers a near-parody of the spiritual universe of Bresson's earlier films: these children of the revolution tremble with uncertainty, and their loose gestures and shambling ways conflict with his precise images. Both the world and Bresson's cinema are in disarray, and the signs of his inner conflict are deeply troubling and tremendously moving.

Bresson's penultimate masterpiece is also his dizziest curveball, right before he knocked our collective blocks off with L'Argent. After Les Affaires Publiques, this somber film is also Bresson's most comical, with several brief digressions and asides (amorous encounters in the glen, a box of chocolates tossed into a busy street, Charles's catalog of insolent gestures), and looks askance at the ill-defined chip on the youthful, maladjusted hero's shoulder.

Like all Bresson's movies, "The Devil, Probably" is a drama of faith so formally rigorous and uncompromising as to border on the absurd — a Dostoyevskian story of a tormented soul presented in the stylized manner of a medieval illumination.

While it's risky to apply characters' views to the writer/director, Bresson does endorse their angry arrogance. The film's style is so clear and assured, that it seems "perfectly aware" of its "own superiority," per Charles. When the bookseller/writer (Geoffroy Gaussen) notes the acceleration of the "process of psychological disintegration" aided by "books, films and drugs," you know that The Devil, Probably is an exception, or an indictment.

How to account for the intensity of feeling this film inspires? Speaking from experience, I can only suggest that for those on its wavelength, The Devil, Probably has the force of a revelation, even on repeat encounters. It's an existentialist horror movie, complete with zombielike cast and looming apocalypse, and in place of scare tactics, a brutal, breathtaking logic and concision.

There's something mannered and at times even freakish about Bresson's handling of well-clothed adolescents and his multifaceted editorializing — which improbably recalls Samuel Fuller in its anger and dynamic energy — but the power and conviction of this bitter, reflective parable are remarkable. Not a masterwork perhaps, but certainly the work of a master...

Bresson understands androgyny the way Mrs. Woolf did. He knows just what to do with it; he celebrates it and he mourns it. The devil was, probably, not a woman. Nor a man. He was a chimera. Bresson, in holy battle against all devils, shows viewers the face of evil. He invokes blessings for the damaged and the fallen, the weak and the rest of us. He never sermonizes. He is the greatest living film creator.

The cinema would be much the poorer for Bresson's absence, but we could console ourselves with the knowledge that The Devil Probably leaves us with a testament of moral and artistic elegance that is extremely rare in any age. Though much of the film may seem exasperating even to his erstwhile admirers, its privileged moments are so rigorously and exquisitely fashioned that the ultimate effect is one of an abrupt awakening to the longings of the spirit.

Two viewings are not sufficient to place it within Bresson's "oeuvre," but I suspect it may be his most completely realized film since Au hasard Balthazar... It's an extraordinary film from a great filmmaker.

The film requires a spiritual progression on the part of its audience—from antipathy to compassion to awestruck admiration—no less rigorous than that of its hero.

Bresson has achieved such a degree of emotional involvement with his characters, and his artistic control has created such a perfectly realized film, that one comes away from the film feeling uplifted. It may be the portrait of the end of a civilization, and I am sure Bresson wants it to be that; but when a civilization can produce a work as exalting as this one, then it is hard to believe that there is no hope.