Robert Bresson’s most controversial film, this unforgivingly bleak yet uncommonly sensual portrait of the contemporary youth generation was prohibited to viewers under eighteen in France as an incitement to suicide.
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The most controversial film of Bresson's career, Le Diable probablement was prohibited to viewers under the age of eighteen in France as an incitement to suicide. At the Berlin Film Festival, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and British critic Derek Malcolm threatened to walk off the jury if their support for it was not made public. (Malcolm wrote that "The Devil, Probably was for me a masterpiece, and one that history will vindicate," and Fassbinder inserted an extended homage to it in his own film The Third Generation.) A work that in many ways seems more relevant now than when it was made, Le Diable traces the last six months in the life of a young Parisian in search of his own demise, who rejects the conventional solutions offered by politics and religion, saying "My sickness is that I see clearly." "Bresson's best film since Pickpocket. . . . Even though Bresson has painted a dark picture of wasted youth and beauty, one comes out of the film with a sense of exultation. When a civilization can produce a work of art as perfectly achieved as this, it is hard to believe that there is no hope for it" (Richard Roud).