I Hate Life but I Hate Death Too
On Robert Bresson's 'The Devil, Probably' (1977)
Robert Bresson’s penultimate film, The Devil, Probably (1977), opens with a newspaper headline announcing the death of its main character. Charles (Antoine Monnier), a young man with aristocratic features and a glum disposition, has been found dead from a (supposedly) self-inflicted gunshot wound and from there, the skeletal narrative unfolds in flashback, taking us through the six months leading up to Charles’ death. It’s a surprisingly fatalistic structure that Bresson imposes on the film. Whereas his 1967 drama Mouchette culminated with the titular character’s suicide, here, the French cineaste establishes death as an inevitability from the go.
The Devil, Probably takes place in the French student milieu of the ‘70s, an environment that has all but abandoned the revolutionary fervor that permeated it only a decade earlier and has instead become home to all manner of dropouts, do-nothings, and disillusioned refuseniks. The world that Charles and his peers inhabit has been swallowed by the void of nihilism and their quest for any semblance of meaning — or at least some form of genuine pleasure — brings them into contact with the remnants of Marxist political groups, careless polyamory, psychoanalysis, and even the Catholic Church.
The film sees Bresson at his most discoursive: a therapy session with a bespectacled shrink sees Charles laying out his philosophy of refusal: “I’m perfectly aware of my superiority,” he says bluntly. “But if I did anything, then I’d be useful, even in some small way, in a world that disgusts me…I prefer to know that there’s no way out.” The scene in church, meanwhile, features a priest being accosted by his congregation about Catholicism’s role in modern life, being accused of “[running] after Protestants” and “no longer [believing] in the supernatural.” All the while, the organ that is being serviced blares periodically, imbuing the exchange with an additional element of disarray.
“Disarray,” of course, means something different to Bresson than it does to most. His disdain for acting — he famously referred to his actors as “models” — led him to seek something from his cast that went beyond the naturalistic, beyond performance itself. Accordingly, this comparatively chaotic scene doesn’t feature big emotional outbursts but rather remains fixed in the same flat affect that runs through the rest of the film — and the rest of his oeuvre — as well. The disarray is in the words the characters speak — “Everyone is against everyone else,” as critic Serge Daney put it — rather than in the way they say them.
Describing the film as “merely” grappling with the fallout of the ‘60s would be selling it short, however, as Bresson gets at something more elemental about life in a decaying society, making use of uncharacteristically didactic techniques such as splicing footage of environmental destruction into the narrative, tracing our societal ruin back to our destruction of the planet. A character accompanies these images by quoting an array of statistics sure to conjure even greater despair amongst a contemporary audience which currently faces a perpetual crisis that is simultaneously economic, ecological, social, political, and spiritual.
In her 1964 essay Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson, Susan Sontag wrote that “it is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color” but he would make the switch from black and white in 1969 with A Gentle Woman — one of his more underappreciated films, incidentally. Coinciding with the failure of the May ‘68 movement, his color films took on the particularities of their time more directly, 1974’s Lancelot of the Lake being the notable exception. Accordingly, the filmmaker increasingly left behind the character studies that made his name in favor of a more panoramic view of society.
His final film, L’Argent (1983), was a similar pit of despair, though Yvon (Christian Patey), the film’s down-on-his-luck protagonist, inflicts Charles’ grim fate on innocents rather than on himself. (The grisly image of blood spatter on tacky wallpaper singlehandedly justifies the director’s decision to leave black and white cinematography behind.) Writing for The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby described it as “[having] the manner of an official report on the spiritual state of a civilization for which there is no hope.” Bresson’s unsentimental view of human nature echoes throughout his body of work — informed by both his experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II and his Catholicism — but his later work lays the corrosion of the human soul squarely at the feet of modern society.
In a recent piece for The Big Ship, I wrote at length about the films of Hisayasu Satô and pink films more broadly, and described Satô’s 1988 film Celluloid Nightmares — a spin on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) — as a “perverse tale which takes his characters into the shadowy recesses of the human psyche, where death and eros once again congeal.” (Though it would have been the more elegant choice, “Eros and Thanatos” felt a tad pretentious.) The Devil, Probably finds Charles in a similar position, plotting his death while drifting from one sexual encounter to the next, though Bresson’s evenness of tone renders this amalgamation of love and death far less sensual, far less lurid than Satô does. (A quick aside: the same way Sontag found it “almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color,” it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine a Satô film without the warped VHS aesthetic that marks most copies currently circulating on the internet.)
But while Satô frequently portrays sex (and, controversially, sexual violence) as an act of liberation — a trait he shares in common with quite a few Japanese filmmakers, especially his Japanese New Wave forebears whose depictions of rape were once characterized by critic James Quandt as “Marcusean” — there is no trace of any liberatory power in Charles’ sexed-up death march. The desperation is the same but while some of Satô’s miscreant protags often do find reprieve, maybe even some semblance of purpose, in giving themselves over to their desires completely, Bresson’s characters often fail to find that same relief or quasi-contentment and in The Devil, Probably, neither the threat of imminent annihilation nor the thrill of debauchery register anymore. Even the suicide at the heart of the film is ultimately revealed to be passive in nature: Charles pays the drug-addicted Valentin (Nicolas Deguy) to kill him and, in a final moment of tragedy, has his final epiphany cut short when his fellow drifter shoots him in the back of the head mid-sentence.
The film has always had its admirers: musician Richard Hell once called it “by far the most punk movie ever made;” fellow French filmmakers Claire Denis, who was an extra on Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), and Olivier Assayas have written and spoken admiringly of the film; when the film premiered at the 1977 Berlinale, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder threatened to resign from the festival jury should the film fail to win an award (it ended up winning the Special Jury Prize, also known as the Silver Bear), adding that “in the future…this film will be more important than all the rubbish which is now considered important.”
Indeed, so much of what currently competes for our attention in the realm of art (or “content” as the suits and their media lackeys prefer these days) is either uninterested in or unable to meaningfully engage with the world it finds itself in — in spite of the constant proclamations of relevancy and importance coming from the culture commentariat. In an age where so many of our artists are either content to retreat into dull sloganeering (usually in service of HR-department liberalism), pick up a quick paycheck (the swaths of indie directors of, admittedly, wildly varying talent gobbled up by the IP machine), or pander to Millennials’ arrested development (the breathless enthusiasm that art intended for children regularly elicits from adult audiences remains an eerie phenomenon, especially when it manifests like this), Bresson’s vision of a world hurtling towards oblivion feels more prescient, urgent, and yes, important than ever.
Let's fucking go