The Devil, Probably

A film set in Paris. Charles is a student in his early twenties. Intelligent, calm, attached to nothing. He has friends around him; one is busy with politics, one with the church, one with drugs. The film moves him through the city. He goes into meetings, listens to arguments and accepts none of them. Documentary footage is cut in: forests felled, sea poisoned, animals killed, nuclear waste. Those sections are placed directly inside the narrative. Charles's problem is not depression; it is the conclusion he has drawn about where the world is going. He sees a doctor, talks, and refuses treatment. What the narrative is interested in is not the crisis of youth but responsibility: the film asks who is deciding, and the answer is in its title. The structure follows Bresson's known method: the actors are not professionals, the lines are read flat, there is no expression, and the camera looks mostly at hands and feet. The last section takes place in a cemetery. On release it was given an eighteen certificate in France, on the grounds that it might influence the young. It won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Antoine Monnier plays the lead; he is not a professional actor. Robert Bresson wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Bresson and cold, formal cinema. Who it is not for: a great many people; the film refuses emotional connection and its subject is suicide.