The Devil, Probably

Famously declared “the most punk movie ever made” by Richard Hell, Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably is the director’s unsettling vision of life in the modern world as seen through the eyes of the youth. Young Charles (Antoine Monnier) is a teenager searching for meaning and only finding misery. From drugs to religion to radical politics, Charles cannot break out of his spiral of despair. Bresson’s penultimate film, The Devil, Probably, which includes scenes of ecological destruction and nuclear annihilation, feels as if the director was assessing the “progress” of the 20th century and concluding that society had failed to live up to its potential. (Robert Bresson, France, 1977, 95 min.) In French with English subtitles