Product Details

• Actors: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano, Nicolas Deguy
• Directors: Robert Bresson
• Format: Color, Subtitled, NTSC
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: New Yorker Video
• VHS Release Date: May 16, 2000
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 630434855X
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #201,408 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Study of Nihilism, July 10, 2000

By 

mto "mto" (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Devil, Probably [VHS] (VHS Tape)

With a cool, quiet narrative tone & an absence of any theatricality, Bresson presents a series of tableaux involving a group of young people who confront evidence of danger & evil in the world. The tone is of disaster & imminent disaster, without redemption. Whether in hollow words of politic rhetoric or psychiatry, or in images of ecological disaster: the destruction of forests & oceans, atomic annihilation. The central protagonist is a figure who is unable to conform his despair: Outside of society & social mores he articulates his alienation & his nihilism. As with other Bresson films, the protagonist ultimately loses himself & in doing so attains a state of "grace" through his passage of suffering & loss.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best expression of the malaise of our time!, September 14, 2005

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Devil, Probably [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Charles is a modern day fallen Angel and his quartet of friends ,deeply immersed in protests and committed against the pollution of an industrialized consumer society. But nevertheless is far to be satisfied, the psychoanalysis, the church, the revolution do not work out as devices and soon he will make a desperate bargain with a junkie friend
May be this film can express a late homage to the French New Wave, but I think this is a simple title. Bresson ' s stature is quite difficult to entitle.
Bresson is Bresson, unique, masterful and sublime.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bresson's best film, June 8, 2004

By 

J from NY (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Devil, Probably [VHS] (VHS Tape)

While "L'argent" and a number of Bresson's other films dance around the issue of the void and the consequent immunity of the lucid individual to any form of hope, "Le Diable" confronts it head on.

Charles, an apathetic, negative, yet somehow compelling young man walks around Paris with his 'friends' (he has no real contact with them) and searches, a bit lazily, for a meaning to live in a society which offers none. Horrific shots of environmental destruction and human deformities resulting from pollution give an added impact to the film.

In the end, however, Bresson's focus is Charles--his miserable and joyless hedonism, his situationisteque responses to the outside world's demand for him to 'act', and his seemingly unabating feelings of alienation and despair. The dry, realist tone of the film is Bresson's abrasive answer to our demand for drama in the questions of metaphysics Charles' unspeakingly proposes in his behavior. Bresson knows that in the actual world no one would care or give the time of day to a young man of Charles' age with these kind of questions. The paradox of the film is that Charles is an unsympathetic character in terms of his relations to others. And yet we have nothing but the utmost sympathy for his nihilistic (or not?) plight. The attractive leading actor is literally able to enact man's tenuous place in the universe with a few downward glances. Of course, all attempts to save Charles are in vain; he is looking for truth, which is nowhere to be found. He toys with suicide and in the end opts for a mercy killing via a junkie friend he has a strange empathy for. While one would doubt that anyone cares enough anymore to sacrifice their own skin for the sake of a universal truth, it is both numbingly depressing and exhilarating to see on film. Charles takes on the character (keep in mind, this is *cinema*) of a kind of saint of revolt through his last act of despair. I would say that while this film would be nothing for most people, it would be everything for a few.