Like many of the late films of Robert Bresson, The Devil, Probably is, as the title suggests, a dark story of disaffected French youth in modern Paris: four disillusioned young adults who wander city streets and hole up in tiny apartments while serving witness to society's destruction of the planet. Bresson described the work as "a film about the evils of money, a source of great evil in the world whether for unnecessary armaments or the senseless pollution of the environment." It may not be the bleakest film in his canon--the honors surely belong to his final work L'Argent--but it is certainly one of his most depressing. Charles, the womanizing ringleader of the group, is haunted by an overwhelming sense of nihilism that finally envelops him. Newsreel clips of ecological disasters and atomic destruction punctuate the film and the backdrop of a busy but cold, impersonal, mercenary Paris is Bresson's least flattering portrait of the city. But it is a beautiful film, and it's clear that Bresson has invested himself in its sad desperation. Nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear and winner of Silver Berlin Bear (Special Jury Prize) at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival.

***

Regarded by many as a masterpiece, Bresson is film tells the story of a young man living in Paris who desires more from life than the glib, superficial truths and material things that are on offer to him. He reaches out to his friends and psychiatrist to provide him with the great answers in life. But his spiritual deliverance remains beyond his grasp until he reaches a bizarre arrangement with a fellow drifter.

***

Bresson observes his Parisian student protagonist in numb recoil from a culture, almost a species, compromised beyond recall. As so often in Bresson, the process of detachment ends in deliberately sought death. Here Charles' proxy suicide stands, as Jan Dawson has perceptively noted, both as an affirmation of a purity no longer possible within society, and 'as a portent of the millions of deaths, not self-willed, which must inevitably follow', given the ruthless course of society's crimes. Charles and the two women in his life are offered less as convincing portrayals of life on the student fringe than as indices of a particular state of consciousness. Beside the toughness of Pickpocket, the depth of feeling of Une Femme Douce, the rigour of Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably has a certain opaque quality. 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.

Excerpt from TimeOut Film Guide located HERE