Customer Reviews

The Devil, Probably [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Beautiful poem of being in the world and not knowing why, seeing evil and being powerless to respond. Like most of Bresson's later work (Lancelot, L'Argent), when the film ends it is a kick in the gut. Bresson just walks away.

I saw this film at the NY FIlm festival, sometime in the 70's. It was paired with Passolini's Salo (Sade's 120 Days of Sodom), and I can say for sure that the audience was much more shaken by Bresson. That alone is worth a few stars, and of course, anything that Bresson does is interesting.

This film is unquestionably a five-star masterpiece, but be forewarned that this New Yorker release is EDITED. One notable omission occurs during the stock footage sequence of environmental destruction early in the film; the scene where the seal is clubbed to death has been cut out of this version, which of course sanitizes the horror of what Bresson is conveying about man's relationship to the world. Hoping Criterion will acquire the rights to this film as well as L'Argent, Four Nights of a Dreamer, Lancelot du Lac, Une Femme Douce, and A Man Escaped and give them all the deluxe treatment they deserve. Save your $$.