French director Robert Bresson was certainly one of the most distinctive filmmakers. He was meticulous in his work, producing only 14 films over a long career. He occasionally made a film that could be described as both profound and entertaining (e.g., A Man Escaped), but, for the most part, systematically stripped his films of such entertaining elements as plot or the acting skills and appealing looks of professional actors so that nothing would get in the way of the existential messages that he intended his films to convey. The austerity of his style limits the audiences for his works right off the top, but erudite film lovers will tolerate Bresson’s peculiarities as long as the substance that he delivers is as profound as he intends. The problem with the present film, The Devil, Probably, is that it is neither entertaining nor profound. In point of fact, its message is just plain wrong!

Historical Background: Like Bergman, Bresson wrestled with his religious upbringing for much of the rest of his life. Several of his early films (Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket), in fact, deal expressly with the issue of religious faith, generally affirming its importance. Bresson, however, later lost his faith as he grew older and gradually turned into an agnostic and, finally, an atheist. He was unable, at that stage, to develop an adequate philosophical substitute for the religious faith of his younger years and suffered enormously from alienation, dissatisfaction, and depression. Though I am myself an atheist, I view Bresson as the worst kind of advertisement for atheism. Bresson might well have been better off had he not lost his faith. The Devil, Probably was Bresson’s penultimate movie, produced when he was seventy years of age. Its thematic substance is basically the miserable mindset of a bitter, depressed, and spiritually-bereft old man – not much that should appeal to most movie-goers. The Devil, Probably advances the viewpoint that mankind has so thoroughly messed up both the natural environment and the social environment that the only reasonable choice for any honest and perceptive person is suicide.

The Story: Charles (Antoine Monnier) is a Parisian student, initially active in the leftist student movement that was prominent in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He is a somber 20-year-old with long hair and an attractive face, but so fully soured on the shortcomings of human society that he feels alienated and depressed. He is not lacking for friends, however, being the love interest of not one, but two, pretty young ladies, Alberte (Tina Irissari) and Edwige (Laetita Carcano). He is also friendly with Michel (Henri De Maublanc), an environmental activist. His coterie of friends recognize that Charles is suicidal and do their best to reach out to him, through discussion, affection, arranging for a visit to a psychiatrist, and stealing and discarding the bottle of arsenic that he has acquired. Considering that Charles gives nothing back to them in return, the three do a pretty commendable, if ineffective, job trying to save their friend.

Charles’ catalog of distressing circumstances include, not surprisingly, pretty much the same list as Bresson’s (as well as most leftist activists). There are the well-documented horrors of pollution that threaten the natural environment, the slaughter of seals, elephants, and rhinos, capitalistic exploitation, depletion of natural resources, and neglect of the poor. Charles seeks solace from religion, music, drugs, and a libertine sexual lifestyle, but none of these raise his spirits. Recognizing that he lacks the stomach for suicide, he hires a drug addict to shoot him, in accordance with the old Roman custom.

Themes: Clearly, Bresson’s alter ego in this film is the protagonist, Charles. It is Charles’ film, from beginning to end, and nothing suggests that Bresson disagrees with or disapproves of Charles’ worldview. Bresson’s contention, therefore, is that Charles is alienated and, ultimately, suicidal because there are so many terrible inadequacies in how humans treat one another and their natural environment. Bresson is repeating one of the great fallacies about the human mind – that depression and feelings of alienation can have a rational basis. He should have spent more time studying psychology and neuroscience instead of depending entirely on philosophy for his comprehension of the human experience.

Human emotions are governed by evolutionarily older parts of the brain, mainly the limbic system, but also including even more primitive systems of the brainstem (called the reward and punishment systems). The emotional life that we experience as humans is not very much unlike that of other mammals except in so far as we give verbal interpretations to it. By contrast, cognition (thinking, logic, reasoning, and all verbal activities) is the province of the newest part of the brain, the cerebrum, which is more highly developed in people than other critters. Emotion is, therefore, more basic than cognition. Emotion has a much greater capacity to influence cognition than the other way around. Intelligent people (those with strong cognitive capabilities and, typically, more cognitively oriented) who are also depressed often fall into the trap of believing that their depression is due to their cognitive understanding of negative aspects of human life. In reality, the depression comes first, exists for its own primal reasons, and then directs the person’s cognition toward preoccupation with negative thoughts. It is the depression that affects thinking, not the other way around. Like Charles, many smart depressed people believe that their only problem is that they see things too clearly. They convince themselves that anyone seeing life as they clearly see it would have to be depressed.

The reality of life here on earth is that the future is largely indeterminate, except, to an extent, in the very short term. We can sometimes forecast events that will occur in the next few months or even, for major trends, a decade or two into the future. Consider, however, that no one living in, say, 1800 A.D. could have given anything resembling an accurate portrayal of life as it exists today after 2000 A.D. For every doomsday scenario that one can construct, in relation to the environment, nuclear holocaust, or big-brother type futuristic societies, there are equally credible positive scenarios, such as Gene Roddenberry’s vision in the Star Trek series and films. Furthermore, short term trends are sometimes distinctly different than long term trends. If we look back on the course of history, we can see that change is sometimes cyclical in nature. Nations will flower and experience a golden age, recede for a time into a dark age, then bounce back. One can imagine a world so horribly overpopulated that nearly everyone has sunk into poverty and hunger. Alternatively, one can imagine self-contained space cities powered by solar energy and sharing earth’s orbit. One can imagine the final depletion of all of earth’s non-renewable sources of energy or one can imagine a vast array of solar collectors on the back side of the moon beaming an almost limitless supply of energy to the earth to power earthly activities. Since the future is indeterminate, one’s attitude toward life here on earth and its future directions is far more a reflection of one’s psychology than one’s intellect. Neither optimism nor pessimism is a rationally necessary intellectual position.

The three things to which we most aspire in our mental lives are happiness, truth, and beauty. Of those three, happiness (a positive emotional state) is the one that came first in the history of evolution. It is the only one of the three that we share in large measure with animals. People don't usually even begin to concern themselves with truth or beauty until some basic level of happiness has been secured. Happiness can be thought of as a state of mental health in your limbic system. Truth and beauty are constructs that have very little meaning in relation to earthly critters other than humans precisely because they are products of cognitive activities of the cerebral cortex. The surest way to fail in the effort to find truth and happiness is to mix the two together. I don’t personally espouse the non-affectivity of Buddhism nor the sacrifice of intellect to faith as in Christianity. In my view, people should embrace both their emotional lives and their cognitive lives but not mistake one for the other. If we allow our cognitive activities to be subordinated to pursuit of happiness, we arrive, in the end, at subjective bias, not truth. If we attribute our emotions to negative thoughts, we lose the ability to deal with those emotions at their own actual level of origin. We need to own both our emotions and our thinking skills, but we need also to recognize the difference between the two.

The word “faith” is actually a rather complicated word. There is a “secular” meaning to the word that I fully embrace. We suggest to people, for example, that they have faith in the future or faith in their friends. In that use of the term, faith means, essentially, a positive or optimistic outlook. In that meaning, “faith” relates exclusively to the emotional domain of our minds – as it should. The religious meaning of “faith” includes the emotional meaning but adds a second element. Religious faith can help a person maintain a positive outlook but it also demands that certain intellectual viewpoints be accepted as truth without those viewpoints having been developed as a product of reason. Bresson lost his faith because his intellect could no longer sustain the insult to reason that his Christian faith demanded of him. Since his emotional faith (positive outlook) was tied to the intellectual component of faith (adherence to doctrine), when he lost one, he lost the other. For those who grow up as atheists or become atheists early in life, it’s a non-issue. Most atheists develop emotional faith in the future of mankind and the worthwhileness of living, independent of any doctrines about god or an afterlife.

Poor Charles, in The Devil, Probably, and Bresson, by extension, were badly in need of guidance, which Charles, at least, failed to get from religion, his friends, or the psychiatrist whom he visited. The priority, in dealing with Charles, should have been to break the false link he had made between his emotional alienation and his pessimistic, left-leaning views about the horrors of pollution, armaments, and capitalism. His disgust with certain aspects of the world he lived in could not be addressed in other than small ways through activism but his psychological distress needed immediate attention because it had reached crisis proportions.

Don’t fall for Bresson’s claim, in this film, that depression, alienation, and suicide are appropriate responses to the sometimes ugly world we humans have created for ourselves! Depression is an emotional problem not a cognitive one and needs to be dealt with as such. Bresson himself was suicidal, though he ultimately lived to age ninety-eight. He once stated, “For myself, there is something which makes suicide possible – not just possible but absolutely necessary: it is the vision of the void, the feeling of void which is impossible to bear.” It’s too bad that he felt that way but unconscionable that he felt the necessity to promote his bleak, pessimistic vision to others. At least one reviewer that I came across was sucked into Bresson’s pretension of telling it like it is, claiming, “Charles has crossed over to an existential enlightenment,” recognizing that “it is all humanity itself that guides and allows for the persistence of a destructive status quo.” My responses to that bleak view of life include: penicillin, emancipation, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, lilies in bloom, cinema, the Peace Corps, universal suffrage, electricity, the Hubble telescope, waterfalls, and so forth.

Production Values: Bresson returns to his usual arsenal of tactics aimed at minimizing distraction from his lessons in life, including nonprofessional actors and minimal plot. Though The Devil, Probably is in color, in contrast to most Bresson films, the palette is bleak and subdued and the lighting minimal, so that the difference between color and black-and-white is really very little. Bresson even takes steps to remove any suspense from his story, revealing the outcome in the opening frames, which show newspaper accounts reporting Charles’ death, one stating that it was a suicide and the other a murder. Bresson wants this film to be about why this death occurred, not whether. Every film frame is drained of all warmth and vitality, effectively revealing Charles’ emotional blunting. The performances are good – by Bresson standards: listless, unemotional, unsympathetic. Exactly what the master demanded.

Bottom-Line: There is really little reason to see this film, other than as fodder for discussion of why Bresson’s pessimistic view is not the necessary one that he believes it to be. Bresson strips his films of entertainment value – we know that going in – but this one fails to deliver a credible existential message. We don’t really need the depressed people of the world arguing that it’s the rest of us who have gotten it all wrong. The Devil, Probably is in French with English subtitles. It has a running time of 95 minutes.

Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age