The story begins twice: once with newspaper headlines informing us that Antoine Monnier’s young Charles has died mysteriously, and then we go back to six months prior, with Charles discussing proper walking technique to avoid wear and tear on shoes. It’s arguably the pettiest example of Charles believing that the world has gone wrong, but what could be more significant than knowing how to walk through the world?
Robert Bresson’s penultimate carving, The Devil, Probably (1977), has endured in ways that don’t quite reflect the feelings toward the rest of his films. The black-and-white titles don’t quite seem to exist in our world, even if some of them weren’t period pieces at the time, and neither does Lancelot du Lac. The pair of overt Dostoevsky adaptations and L’Argent may be Russian literature twisted into a brand new shape to reflect the times, but the sources remain. (Not commonly remarked upon is that The Devil, Probably swipes two lines from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for its title and Charles’ suicide note.) It’s far more common to see The Devil, Probably’s iconic poster design or a screencapped quote from Charles used for purposes resembling a personal stamp on social media platforms. It’s the one fully original Bresson story where there isn’t much of a connection to an older way of the world, as what remains of it is getting hollowed out: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Rainer Werner Fassbinder accurately assessed that it would remain more important “than all the rubbish which is now considered important but which never really goes deep enough” when he first saw it at the Berlin Film Festival, and he was bitterly vindicated. Much like Charles, he might have seen things too clearly for his own good.
Richard Hell notably called the film “the most punk film ever made,” which is a little like saying his own Television or Pere Ubu were the most punk bands ever formed: their innovations arrived before punk had even settled its ethos. Pere Ubu’s soundtracks to a Rust Belt wasteland came out of Cleveland around the same time as The Devil, Probably, and the sound of Bresson has never quite been so industrialized and rotting as it is here. (Even the seemingly tranquil opening credits feature the peace of the Seine at night being interrupted by a cruise ship.) The most famous example is the cast of young teens leaving a protest, stepping into a church, and each one delivering a single rhetorical question about Catholicism’s role in the present moment without a single reply among them, just the blasting noises of the church’s organ used as punctuation while a carpet is loudly vacuumed. Serge Daney described it as the cast doing nothing but adding their voices to the chaos of the world’s ambience. This is best exemplified by the scene that gives us the film’s title, when it’s the response to a demand to know who’s leading humanity by the nose to certain doom. It’s a public debate staged on a noisy bus, punctuated with a nudge when “le diable, probablement!” is uttered: who ever said Bresson couldn’t be funny?
We see some of the worst of the world’s sounds in action at the protest film screenings Charles and his company of activist friends attend. The film’s still-horrifying images of ecological massacres ranging from seal clubbing to deforestation are perhaps Bresson’s one moment of didacticism, but they’re also a tool to see how his audience and his cast respond. (Paul Schrader has consistently advocated for Pickpocket over the color Bresson films in his lifelong commitment to dissecting a certain kind of cinema he called transcendental, but the Magical Mystery Tour sequence in First Reformed that riffs on the ecological film sequence is the most startling and original of his overt rip-offs.) As always with Bresson, the gesture itself is what matters, and he likes to undercut it: a live fish is caught in the polluted, blocked-off Seine. Who’s to say that’s not a miracle?
Bresson’s materialist focus always had its curdled side, and here the minimalist goes relatively maximalist with his props. An abundance of empty Coke bottles surrounds a bed; a box of chocolates gets regifted and then run over; refrigerators are raided for food and liquor; and helping out a junkie friend means supplying them with more drugs. If all there is to see is valueless detritus that serves as its own form of nuclear waste, perhaps there are other consolations to be found in the mind, but only Mozart cuts through Charles’ mourning fog depicted on that famous poster. He leaves his girlfriend Edwige for Alberte out of the kind of love that Bressonian models were never allowed to show in their eyes — their affairs and feelings seem to be the origin story behind the dynamic of male meanness and female endurance that was the engine behind so many of the most painful moments in prior Bresson films. Always a true classicist in his fondness for the homoerotic, Charles is ultimately the one Bresson depicts as far more naked in more than one sense: Alberte is really in love with their friend Michel and doesn’t know why she’s with Charles at all. Are these supposed friends who don’t seem to have much genuine affection for Charles the devil? If nothing else, they certainly lead an openly suicidal Charles by his nose to the most foolish figure in the film. The appropriately named psychiatrist, Dr. Mime, demands that Charles put money in his purse, and then gifts him the suicidal conclusion that drives the film’s final moments: getting a servant of sorts to do the killing act for him.
The May ‘68 hangover from unfulfilled hopes of toppling the system was perhaps most ideally expressed by a sense of drifting, with Bresson, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and The Whore, and Philippe Garrel’s reminiscence Regular Lovers all falling into the kind of total haze that resembles clarity. Where the Garrel ensemble falls into a stupor and doesn’t seem to ever get up, and Jean-Pierre Leaud is left curled up and vomiting from his own romantic sins at the end of the Eustache, Charles asks his drug-addicted friend Valentin to be the one to shoot him in exchange for further drug money, goes out on the town, and finally relearns how to walk. Alas, he’s still in a Bresson film, and the side characters in those tend to have even darker arcs than the protagonist — best not to let one around you with a gun, and don’t say you weren’t warned from the beginning.
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