The Devil, Probably

It is probably blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of the Cinema, Robert Bresson, to suggest that the Jansenist austerities of that director’s late style are invidiously thematic. Received wisdom asserts that Bresson’s famously repetitive and emotionally disengaged style is wonderfully lucid, cogent, and, even, transcendental – the filmmaker’s vocabulary of feet crossing corridors, affectless performances, locked and unlocked thresholds and gates is said to constitute a Euclidean grammar of the sublime, quite the opposite of the squalid material that his films dramatize. But there is another reading: one might argue that Bresson’s late style is desiccated, petrified, a series of bland gestures mindlessly repeated that mummify his characters and drain the life out of them. The subject of “The Devil, Probably” is a radically disaffected youth scrupulously observed on his route to a coldly calculated suicide. But if you were confronted with a world where meaning is comprised of carefully interlocking shots of people’s ankles as they traverse floors, hands fumbling with locks, staring faces repeating their lines robotically as if by rote, belt buckles and mid-torsos, a sex scene depicted elliptically by the man reading a newspaper and the woman arriving and, then, departing through a half-locked hotel door, wouldn’t you, perhaps, out of sheer boredom consider suicide yourself? By this I mean if you “read” Bresson’s style as evidence of an alarming spiritual aridity, then, his subject matter and bizarre stylistic tics seem thematically linked. In “The Devil, Probably”, a beautiful and androgynous young man has two girlfriends, neither of which seem to excite him overmuch. At the start of the film, with some friends, he is dabbling in some kind of anarchist politics – the kind of political activity characterized by putting obscene pictures in religious books sold at the local cathedral. (Bresson is not subtle: at the Cathedral, an organist is tuning a huge Baroque instrument that issues alarming burps and hiccups as a group of angry students debate the future of religion and its irrelevance to modern society: Bresson makes the organ comment on the vapid platitudes mouthed by both sides to the discussion – he pronounces a pox on both houses, the irreligious and the glibly faithful; in his eyes, both sides are equally fraudulent.) The androgynous and doomed youth is the son of an (unseen) contractor who, apparently, ravages forests in order to erect homes in the province – in one effective scene, the kid cowers in a car, as big trees topple to the ground. We don’t see workers cutting the trees, nor are we told why the trees have to be sacrificed and the cumulative impact of the montage of inexplicably falling trees is powerful, if enigmatic – like much environmental mischief the images of the falling trees are more fascinating than the forest would be if it were preserved intact; as Antonioni found in “The Red Desert”, the problem with ecological calamity is that it is so damned picturesque. (The montage of trees collapsing into the dust reminds me of the fantastically memorable and brilliant imagery in Bresson’s later “Lancelot du Lac” of knights in their shining armor dropping into heaps of battered metal detritus.) Bresson’s heavy hand is everywhere evident in the picture: the passengers in a Parisian bus debate the course of the world and, when someone reasonably asks “Who’s driving?”, one of the disgruntled bus-riders says: “The Devil, probably.” Predictably, the bus crashes a few seconds later, throwing everyone forward in their seats, and the bus-driver hops off the vehicle and, apparently, runs away – I saw “apparently” because Bresson doesn’t show the crash or what the bus hits and the final scene in this sequence is the front door of the bus, left half-open, through the driver precipitously fled – the shot is held for a long time and we keep expecting the bus-driver to return but he doesn’t. The suicidal youth is an excellent math student, and obviously brilliant, but, needless to say, he is afflicted with a deep sense of futility – presumably because each of his classes at school features tendentious lectures by fools about the benefits of nuclear power, pedagogy intercut with shots (non sequitur, of course) of buildings destroyed by a nuclear blast. Bresson’s alleged genius isn’t much in evidence in these sequences – a nuclear power plant is not a nuclear weapon and conflating the two doesn’t add any clarity to the debate about greed and environmental catastrophe. The hero’s friend is a sleazy drug addict. When the addict suffers from withdrawal symptoms, the doomed protagonist obligingly gets him some heroin and the youths, then, camp out in a cathedral listening to Monteverdi and lying stoned in their sleeping bags on the church floor. A psychiatrist interviews the hero and the kid is so insufferably nihilistic and precociously articulate that you long for him to put a bullet through his brain. Ultimately, the kid hires his junkie buddy to shoot him in Pere Lachaise cemetery. (He gets the idea for the assisted suicide from the hapless psychiatrist who seems pretty much clueless as well – he’s previously tried drowning himself in the bathtub but found that this doesn’t work.) After being shot, the hero falls to the paving stones, the junkie administers the coup-de-grace with a second bullet through the neck and, then, runs off screen – we’re left with an empty frame. Bresson’s austerity is such that he doesn’t even show us the dead kid; the camera impassively eyes a hedge and some tombs and a roadway down which the junkie has just fled – that’s the end of the film and it is, certainly, uncompromising enough. Bresson’s films devoted to unmitigated misery tend to work more effectively when the audience has some sympathy for the doomed victim of the director’s savagely reductive mise-en-scene – in “The Devil, Probably”, the hero is totally remote, uninteresting beyond his great physical beauty, and completely unsympathetic. Thus, it is impossible to feel any sorrow at his fate. In this film, every shot is a “sign” – that is, each shot signifies some aspect of narrative. Hence, the innumerable shots of feet walking – it’s like old Mixtec and Aztec codices where travel is shown by footprints across a map. Bresson never shows you anything for the sheer pleasure of representing the world – rather, each of his images is a picture that signifies some action, a rebus, or an abbreviation of a completed act. The film is impressive, even artful, but punishing.