Northwest Film Forum

It would seem difficult, in the late 1970s, for an aging director to break the unsympathetic popular perception of the time’s cynical youth. And in The Devil Probably, the lives of the protagonist Charles and his peers are not without their moral inconsistencies. However, Bresson's signature commitment to the ordinary moments of everyday life brings a fresh sensibility to the surly despair of the film’s Parisian youth. Stripped-down, intensified sound and movement at times evoke a sense of imprisonment, but Bresson’s approach affords viewers the freedom to consider the idea that these youth weren’t choosing doubt, suspicion, and despair: they were taken there by the realities of the modern world.

“Bresson’s filmmaking gives a dignity and tremendous power to ordinary life, the truth of life that hardly any other films acknowledge at all [...] In Bresson, the quiet becomes excruciatingly rich.” –Richard Hell