5

THE SUICIDE OF GRACE

Robert Bresson, Le Diable Probablement (The Devil Probably)

The screen depicts what a Catholic writer, Pierre Jean Jouve, called “the desert world,” but it is the world of the cities of imperialism: elevators, staircases, the bourgeois’ doors and locks, maid’s room doors, bus doors, the neon lights of the night, hotels, more staircases. The city – dark beige, gray, midnight blue, made up of blind spots and wet surfaces – dissolves in the loss of meaning. Man in this city is nothing but an aimless wandering, without direction or purpose, to which the strange shots of legs at ground level, with no identity other than the indifferent regularity of their steps, are well suited.

The green splendor of the forest may offer the eye an unexpected oasis, but the scene is one in which trees are being cut down and cleared away and in which the thud of the trunks hitting the ground heralds the spread of the desert. Bresson overlays this with a very solemn monotony, with that uniform, uninflected tone of voice everyone uses, mouthing ordinary ecology’s litany of nonsense, according to which the world’s misery, we are told, culminates in the plight of baby seals.

In these dead spaces of the night, the young people are sleek, remote, living indolently on the quais of the Seine as though in some primitive monastery: recorders and drugs, silences, blank faces, and stupid remarks.

Naturally, the gauchiste bookseller, a lecherous manipulator, goes around prophesying absolute destruction in the crypts, while a labor activist priest is bitterly attacked by his congregation, who hunger for hope and the mass performed in Latin.

After all this, there is the ritual suicide of the angel-faced adolescent, the external light of the gaze drained of all expression except for an opaque certainty, in the quintessence of death that is symbolized in the heart of the darkened city by a Père-Lachaise cemetery with broad, dead-end avenues.

But unlike other nihilists, Bresson only empties everything out the better to pick up God’s trace. In a bare room, a bowl of oranges glows with the splendor of Dutch still lifes. Bent over the suicidal young man is the dense curve of the nape of a woman’s neck. The tribal gathering of the quasi-derelict dissidents on their embankment is reminiscent of the very first Christians of the Roman Empire, poor wretches symbolizing the marginality of the Holy Spirit at its birth. Within the high walls of the church – it, too, inhabited, contrary to its official function, by two young strays in their sleeping bags – the swelling music, the esthete’s typical gimmick, stirs up the emotion needed for preparing to receive the Lord’s anointing.

Bresson – and this is his strength – is saying that this world so full of comforts is actually a dreary twilight. He is saying that youth is tempted by a sort of radical absence, which is exactly right. Having come to this point, as the meticulous promoter of theological reactionism that he is, he creates a cinema of signs, of appeals, of milestones, leveling everything into austere nothingness in order to make God’s unchanging watchfulness shine forth, far in the distance.

As regards the content, Bresson represents the path of the far right, in terms of a certain reality of young people in the cities of imperialism after 1972: the path of prophetic suicide. As regards the form, it is quite lofty; it is dialectics in its purely structural version. In the night of negativity there rises a pale star so old that, in actual fact, its light won’t reach us, however empty and dark Bresson may make his screen, ever again.

La Feuille foudre, Spring–Summer 1978