Concerns about increasing
Russian/American tensions, ecological disasters at the hands of corporations
interested only in profit, an overriding fear of nuclear war, an ineffective
political left, a church that has lost touch with its ability to speak to the
masses - if these were the central set of concerns of a film, when (and where)
would you guess it was from? Because while this film could certainly be made
here today and be 100% relevant, these are the main ideas that thread
throughout French director Robert Bresson’s 1977 drama The Devil, Probably.
At that year’s Berlin Film Festival, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder uttered
some prescient words about the film, which took the jury prize: “...this film will
be more important than all the rubbish which is now considered important but
which never really goes deep enough. The questions Bresson asks will never be
unimportant." And no less an authority than Richard Hell called it “the
most punk movie ever made.”
It’s certainly not a happy film -
it’s a furiously angry one; but the times warranted it then and maybe today’s
world does as well. If Luis Buñuel, considered one of the most pessimistic
filmmakers in cinema history and two years older than Robert Bresson,
ultimately resigned himself to a pattern by the 1970s of making films
satirizing the things he used to attack more mercilessly in his early work,
Bresson, a filmmaker usually noted for his austerity and profoundly spiritual
themes, worked up an angry head of steam at the injustices of the world that
got more savage as he went on, culminating perhaps with this, his penultimate
film, released when he was 76 years old and one of the most ruthlessly
despairing films about the contemporary world ever made.
The film opens with a newspaper
headline telling us about the suicide of a young man in Paris. Then another
headline follows, saying that the alleged suicide was in fact a murder. Then we
jump back six months to find out how this young man, Charles, got there.
Charles - like all of the “models” in Bresson’s films - walks around Paris with
a disaffected air. While this seems like flat acting, it’s a constant technique
throughout Bresson’s works. He called his actors “models” because he simply
wanted them to unemotionally recite their lines, eliminating the normal
dramatics of capital-A acting and allowing the words, the sounds, and the
situations his characters are in to come to the fore. His films are perfect
demonstrations of the famous Kuleshov effect, in which the same film segment of
a Russian actor was intercut with different images, leading viewers to believe
that his expression had changed because of what he was “looking” at, projecting
a new meaning out of the juxtaposition of the two images even though the clip
was the same in all cases. Similarly, Bresson’s models offer no inflections or
reactions while wandering through the world, which in Bresson’s script provides
enough horrors that there’s no need for a trained actor to underscore them with
hand-wringing histrionics. Charles drifts around the city, hanging out with
other disaffected youths, attending political rallies, dating two women, going
to church, trying to drop out with drugs, attending classes, searching for some
meaning in his life, and ultimately we come to see how he has died, after
finding most of his experiences empty, fleeting, and shallow. These are also
underscored with repeated visits to a group of conservationists logging
horrifying footage of ecological disasters, including the needless slaughter of
animals (trigger warning for those who can't abide animal cruelty). All of
these are at some point in the film mentioned in service of money - from a
church that does not adapt to its constituents’ spiritual needs but protects
its wealth (“A Christianity without religion” one of the flock calls it), to
the therapist who is more concerned that his patient pay than helping him heal
(Charles - “If my aim was money and profit, everyone would respect me.”), to
the eco-disasters and animal slaughter in the name of corporate profits, to the
war machine then building between the U.S. and Russia.
These scenes are shot in a way that
no other filmmaker could have done them. In a film so wrought with existential
horrors, one would expect the drama of the scenes to be highlighted, but
Bresson uses his typically elliptical approach, omitting standard methods of
building drama or tension and focusing instead on the rhythm of a scene,
highlighting movement, editing, and sound to recreate that Kuleshov effect over
and over - we aren’t given everything to explain a scene, and neither music nor
acting are there to underscore how we should feel about it, but our minds fill
in the gaps and flesh things out as Bresson’s models speak their lines, and he
lets the juxtaposition and rhythm of his images and sound do the work to create
something far greater than the sum of its parts. His camera is often centered
on objects rather than individuals, suggesting that the trappings of modern
life are as much a part of the problem of the world as the bigger targets he’s
referring to. There’s a famous scene on a city bus where the passengers
collectively engage in a dialogue about the modern world, intercut with the
machinery and sounds of the bus - the cash machine, the opening and closing
doors, the air brake - and one passenger asks “Who’s leading us by the nose?”
He’s answered by another, who provides the film’s title - “The Devil,
probably.” Though Bresson would never admit to a reading so direct, it’s not
too much of a stretch to think that the Devil in question is the greed that
drives everything in the film. In his next (and final) film, a forged 500-franc
bill ruins the lives of everyone it is passed to. The title of that film? - L’Argent,
or in English, Money. He could easily have switched the titles of these
two films and they'd carry the same meaning.
-
Patrick Brown
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