Le Diable probablement (1977)

Le Diable probablement is a French film first released in 1977, directed by Robert Bresson.  The film stars Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano and Nicolas Deguy.  It has also been released under the title: The Devil Probably.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Disillusioned by the failings of a materialistic society, a young man, Charles, searches in vain for meaning in his life.  Education, physical love, religion, politics, religion, even psychiatric treatment…  Nothing, it seems, can offer him a reason for living.  But he cannot bring himself to commit suicide...

Robert Bresson’s darkest film, probably.  Filmed in the minimalist, yet effective, style that distinguished Bresson’s later films, Le Diable probablement is a film which reflects both Bresson’s belief in the sanctity of the human soul and the growing public concern arising from shocking ecological and political disasters of the mid 1970s.

Bresson relieves his audience of the burden of suspense by telling us the film’s outcome in its opening shot.  Likewise, his technique of getting his actors to display no visible emotions in their performances and avoiding filming dramatic sequences directly (except for the remarkable tree-felling sequence), bleeds the film of any theatrical artifice and melodrama.  What is left is a cold, cynical portrayal of one man’s journey towards self-destruction.

A compelling and thought-provoking film which is as relevant today as it was when it was first released.

© James Travers 2000

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The Devil Probably, by Robert Bresson, has many sequences which frame the body of the characters without a head.  The focus on shoes, trousers, feet walking, and, adjacently, on floor, staircases, step ways in the metro, or the final pathway in the graveyard, all seem to emphasis a state of the world where the spiritual is really absent, and only unconvincingly declaimed in the dialogues. Everything looks contaminated, and in the scene which includes a documental film about ecological disasters, the projector’s light itself has the same function of smoke and detritus exhibited.  Only the sight of a polar seal being killed and trees falling in deforestation show a suggestion of human feeling.  Ironically, the sensual colour photography by Pasqualino De Santis and the very suggestive choice of framings imply that art alone is the way of salvation.
Adam Gai 


Robert Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthazar and The Devil Probably are films where plot and meaning are highly stylized by the director’s unique manner of uniting/fusing his intellectual and aesthetic manoeuvers into one living cinematic organism.   The donkey Balthazar in Au Hazard symbolizes not only the human body but the human soul, while the bodies of the young people in Devil symbolize the very intelligence of nature as a pantheistically spiritual creation.

In the two films (separated by a period of eleven years), Bresson compares the ignorantly indifferent and the passively cruel position of a modern society (obsessed with wealth and glamour and occupied with the philistinism of success and competition) towards children and youth. With the grace of a seeker for truth and with a sarcasm of moral frustration, Bresson depicts how today’s system of values becomes more and more anti-spiritual, and for this reason more and more anti-human.

Moral radicalism of both films addresses the heart of the viewers with an insistency and intensity of a prophet’s demand, and it could be unbearable to receive, if not visual harmony and the rhythmic beauty of Bresson’s narrations.   These films - two chapters in the history of Western sensibility - offer a scandalous verdict on the behavioral anti-Christianity of the so called Christian societies.

Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com to read an essay about Bresson’s two films: Balthazar, Marie, Charles, Alberte, Edvige, Valentine (To be Victimized Against our Will as an Existential Law) and also articles dedicated to the films by Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Resnais, Pasolini, Fassbinder, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Alain Tanner and Liliana Cavani.

© Victor Enyutin 2010

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