Robert Bresson’s ‘The Devil, Probably’
Originally published in Cinemania on February 11, 2025.
This essay includes contemplations on the depiction of suicide. If you have had thoughts of self-harm, please call or text 988 or visit the Lifeline center here.
Like A Gentle Woman (1969), The Devil, Probably (1977) opens on (two contradictory reports of) the main character’s suicide, then jumps backward in time. At the 4-minute mark, at a gathering of students (which through context we can infer are an analog to “68ers”), a guy says into the mic, “I proclaim destruction. Everyone can destroy. It’s easy.” Sure enough, the next shots are of polluting smokestacks and dead trees. Even images of green crop fields (shown by projector) come with the dejected commentary that they’re managed with bird-killing pesticides that seep into the water supply and into the human bloodstream.
The mechanisms of government and corporation are an outright perversion to life, an echo of prevailing state and national sentiments that instigated the protests of May 1968, which are never explicitly mentioned but would be unmistakable to a viewing audience in 1977 or ’78. What influences humanity to be so destructive? The film’s title proposes one sweeping, nebulous hypothesis — as oblique and apathetic as a prayer in the aftermath of catastrophe; the frown and shrug emojis paired — which is immediately mocked.
Throughout his career, Bresson’s work spotlighted subjects affected by greater, perpetually abusive powers — adults over kids, men over vulnerable women (and its inversion in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne), religion over faith, militaries over rebellions, governments over constituents, humans over animals (trigger warning for this film: clubbing of a seal pup; you’ll be alerted to the scene with plenty of time to skip ahead) — and predominantly chose for his victimized subjects to meet an extreme (and often unfair) end. It’s a cynical angle, and Bresson was a very disillusioned person, but films like Pickpocket (in which the female lead, 16 years old, becomes a mother and is ditched by the baby’s father, yet finds emotional and financial support through a platonic connection with the reformed Michel, the film’s criminal protagonist) and A Man Escaped (spoiler warning: the guy successfully escapes — and with a young, innocuous accomplice) clue us in on Bresson’s likely intention: these awful things are inevitable until someone or a group takes accountability and/or stands up to the abusive powers.
Protests are acts of optimism, ironically. And as long as that doesn’t happen, it’s too hopeless to survive. Suicide, as a rhetoric device, is mercy; as a character action, it’s the ultimate rejection of authority, a stubborn last protest. Bresson was 76 years old when this was released. After four-plus decades of subtle protests through his films, he got louder, so to speak.
“A cathedral is divine. God is present. But if a priest appears, God is no longer present,” Charles reads aloud from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, accenting the film’s nihilism.
The Devil, Probably is not at all subtle about its position, but as a document of its protagonist Charles — a rebel in every sense (who carries a bottle of cyanide in his backpack, naturally) — and its setting, subtlety would be ineffectual and unjust. The film’s voice could only realistically exist through college students, as Bresson would consider higher education the final stage of youth, which is to say, the final period in people’s lives before they either become the worst of all of us (adults) or kill themselves (A Gentle Woman is the story of a recent graduate). New German Cinema figurehead and rebel icon auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose own premature death wouldn’t be out of place in a Bresson film) said of this film, “The questions Bresson asks will never be unimportant.”
Everything you expect from Bresson (evocative tone, efficiency, technical precision, impeccable sound, pristine images — and yet again, he produces one of the most beautifully-photographed films ever made) is present; the (non)actors’ abilities are immaterial (they’re believable regardless). If you sympathize with the anti-establishment tone of post-68 France (synonymous with all of his work, just more overt here), it’s hard to imagine you won’t be strongly affected. To affect was Bresson’s goal, as it is for any protest; The Devil, Probably is Bresson picking up a bullhorn.