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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (18) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (15) | Rotten (3) | DVD (1)
Not a masterwork perhaps, but certainly the work of a master, and, judging from the work of many of his young French disciples (including Leos Carax), one of his most influential features.
Bresson, as always, holds on to that grace, gives us that beauty. While watching this great rapt film, with its hideous vision of a moral void, we almost can see light flickering in darkness, feel a spirit descending.
Both the world and Bresson's cinema are in disarray, and the signs of his inner conflict are deeply troubling and tremendously moving.
Hold on to something, Bresson implies, or you may fall in love with boredom itself. See it for the mood.
Its case is presented rather than argued: one buys its cosmic bleakness or one doesn't, but there is no doubt about the conviction with which it is put.
No other director I can think of has come as close as Bresson to molding his players into what are, in effect, variations on a continuing personality, much the way a painter might.
Despite Bresson's characteristic evenness of tone and technical curtness -- his trademark is an almost contemptuous dismissal of flashiness -- I felt involved and moved by his pessimistic picture of four young French students.
Robert Bresson's most earnest film is also his least engaging.
Thirty-five years on, The Devil, Probably can still trigger a shock of recognition.
One of the great Robert Bresson's greatest, and least-seen, movies.
The resonant, purposefully ambiguous story is filmed with razor-sharp clarity.
Bears all the hallmarks of Bresson's celebrated restraint, but it also shows its age, so failing to engage that, like its protagonist, you too will (probably) find yourself just wanting it to end.
Bresson's style is all there and it is clear that he wants to make a direct statement in what turns out to be a very political film, but sadly his usual austerity feels a bit off with the kind of story he wants to tell, and so the result seems more pretentious than it is compelling.
Super Reviewer
In "The Devil Probably," the cause of death of a young man is upgraded from suicide to murder. Six months previously, apparently tired of watching films of cute baby seals being clubbed to death, Alberte(Tina Irissari) leaves Michel(Henri de Maublanc) for Charles(Antoine Monnier), despite the latter's lack of a fixed abode, thus risking her relationship with her parents. That's even though Charles is carrying on with Edwige(Laetitia Carcano) who is having other affairs of her own. "The Devil Probably" does not have a plot in any conventional sense of the word. Rather, it is concerned with some issues that are still relevant to the youth of today, such as the poisoning of the environment. Luckily, nuclear armageddon is no longer such a nightmarish possibility while nuclear waste is still on the table. In this world of possibly no future where religion's influence is on the wane, at least Michael is putting up a fight while Charles just goes around in circles. None of that excuses the flat line readings, especially considering the momentous decisions at stake.
Let's be honest,few movies have grappled youth's troublesome occasions and personal scales.What forms this veil of coughing smoke is our social filth,the end of it all.Albert puts it in greater holocaust: "revolution will seize to exist".As is revolution ever occurred in the first place....
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