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"\u201CThe Devil, Probably,\u201D one of the great&amp;nbsp;Robert Bresson\u2019s greatest, and least-seen, movies gets a week-long run (April 20-26) in the midst of BAMcin\u00E9matek\u2019s Bresson retrospective \u2014 resplendent in a new 35mm print and hailed by no less an authority than&amp;nbsp;Richard Hell&amp;nbsp;as \u201Cthe most punk movie ever made.\u201DHell himself will be on hand to explicate following the final screening of \u201CThe Devil, Probably\u201D\u2014 we can note however that Bresson\u2019s voluptuously despairing movie was released in 1977, the same year that both Hell\u2019s Voidoids album \u201CBlank Generation\u201D and \u201CNever Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols\u201D burst upon the scene.Like all Bresson\u2019s movies, \u201CThe Devil, Probably\u201D is a drama of faith so formally rigorous and uncompromising as to border on the absurd \u2014 a Dostoyevskian story of a tormented soul presented in the stylized manner of a medieval illumination. At once chic and austere, \u201CThe Devil, Probably\u201D is a generic youth movie set in a Parisian student milieu where long-haired panhandlers play their bongos by the Seine while sinister nihilists mock religion by planting pornographic photos in church documents. Opening with a newspaper headline (YOUTH KILLS SELF IN P\u00C8RE LACHAISE CEMETERY), it unfolds in flashback to detail the events leading up to demise of its androgynous protagonist Charles, played by Antoine Monnier, a non-actor and the great-grandson of&amp;nbsp;Henri Matisse.Suicide or murder victim, Charles is discovered in the same star-studded graveyard where&amp;nbsp;Jim Morrison&amp;nbsp;reposes in eternal rest. For all his hippie glamour, however, Charles\u2019s corpse is discovered beside the tomb of France\u2019s postwar Communist leader Maurice Thorez \u2014 Bresson\u2019s statement perhaps on the vanity of radical activism. A drop-out more than half in love with easeful death, Charles is shown to have exuded a magnetic passivity \u2014 his equally grave and beautiful peers are transfixed by the purity of his despair, untainted by any belief in the possibility of political action. With his blank, accusatory look, he\u2019s a living reproach to a corrupt, polluted, adult world. \u201CMy sickness is seeing clearly,\u201D he maintains at one point. The movie was initially prohibited to those under 18 as an incitement to suicide;Bresson was 70 when he made \u201CThe Devil, Probably,\u201D and his penultimate film embodies all his hatred for modern society. (Inspired by an actual incident, it was also his first to be totally based on his own material.) Religion is a farce, the world is shown as coming to an end. One character\u2019s involvement with the Association for the Safeguard of Man and His Environment allows for the interpolation of 16mm documentary footage of various oil spills, garbage mounds, and nuclear tests, as well as the clubbing of a baby seal. The movie\u2019s great 25-shot set piece has Charles and his eco-activist friend riding a bus through Paris \u2014 their trip interspersed with ultra-Bressonian cutaways to the inner workings of the exit door or machine for collecting money \u2014 as they debate the nature of No Future.We\u2019re all on the bus and, as if scripted by&amp;nbsp;Bertolt Brecht, the other passengers join in the conversation. \u201CWho\u2019s in charge?\u201D someone asks, setting up the punch line (lifted from \u201CThe Brothers Karamazov\u201D) that provides the movie\u2019s title. This is followed by&amp;nbsp;a mordant Bressonian joke. The vehicle hits something.&amp;nbsp;The director&amp;nbsp;never shows us what \u2014 it\u2019s&amp;nbsp;just a speed bump on Charles\u2019s single-minded march towards oblivion.Read more J. Hoberman in Movie Journal&amp;nbsp;[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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