«Who is it who enjoys making fun of humanity? – Yes, who is maneuvering us on the sly? – The devil probably!» It is not revolt, nor even a resigned anger, which suddenly animates the passengers of a bus which has become, for the duration of a scene, a forum where the word circulates in diffracted bursts and without follow-up. Just the buzzing sound emitted by a handful of strangers soliloquizing without looking at each other. Humanity returned to an atomized community of zombies clearing itself of all responsibility in the face of misfortune, waste, the slow destruction of the world that mass civilization has become. These phrases borrowed from Dostoyevsky, giving its (magnificent) title to Robert Bresson’s penultimate film, the devil probably (1977), it is therefore not up to Charles, a lucid young man with exasperated gentleness, an indolent Christ whose Way of the Cross we follow in a nocturnal and ghostly Paris, that it is up to them to pronounce them.
Still it would have been necessary to believe in it, in the devil, and in words above all. But the speeches, the final sentences, he dismisses them with arrogance. Even at the time of death sublime thoughts will be lacking. Words, his generation, that of the little brothers of May 68, was force-fed with them, but the rebellion was short-lived and now the future is disillusioned: the end of political ideals, the ecological catastrophe underway, for which the youth will have to pay the price. high price – never was a film more synchronous and visionary of what has now become the main concern of our time…
A few false prophets still hold forth, like this bookseller calling for “the destruction of everything” before an assembly of idle youths in what appears to be a crypt – a sign that the revolution is well and truly dead and buried. But this is only easy provocation and vulgar bait to attract girls. Charles is not fooled. Nor are there other more sincere forms of commitment. His proud conscience and his intellectual superiority preserved him from it. “My disease is to see clearly”, he will say to the psychoanalyst to whom his friends (Alberte and Edwige, the two women who share his life, and Michel, the ecological activist) have sent him, worried about his suicidal impulses. Ironically, believing to dissuade him, it is the shrink who will prompt him with the fateful idea of his acting out: entrusting the dirty work to a loved one. The “friend” in question – a drug addict, ready to do anything for money to be able to buy his doses – will carry out the task without qualms without even giving him the final word. Absolute nihilism, speech will be mowed down in mid-flight by a scathing gunshot.
This strangely echoes Bresson’s conception of the voice, which is neither more nor less than one noise among others in a sound symphony, like a broken glass, the metro alarm, the elegiac sweetness of a madrigal by Monteverdi in a church, the cry of a baby seal under the truncheon or the plaintive cry of hundred-year-old trees being felled. Pure sound material, relieved of all psychology – hence the lackluster neutrality of the phrasing that the filmmaker demands of his actors, or rather his “models”. The whiteness of the voices responds to the fragmentation of the images, their metonymy. Bresson films body fragments (hands, legs, faces) as if to better reveal the movement, the hypnotic ballet, and the dazzling beauty, on the verge of fainting. the devil probably is therefore the Time.news of an announced death, that of a godless world that has become uninhabitable, and of a youth (to which it will never have been so close), sacrificed on the altar of consumerism and what it named the “sinister mechanization of life”. A sublime and sublimely desperate song which was to win the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival in 1977. Six years later, he will sign moneyhis latest film.