Bresson's, Un Diable, Probablement @ Sarasota Film Festival 2012

While I watched Robert Bresson's 1977 "Un Diable, Probablement", heated discussions I had around that time with my fellow college film student friends, flooded back to mind. We analyzed the French New Wave,  the true nature of cinema and whether we preferred Bresson to Truffaut or Godard. Conversations like that aren't the norm these days, we're too busy watching our cholesterol levels.

Here I am now, more than 30 years later, at the Sarasota Film Festival in a pretty empty theater where I just watched the exquisitely filmed story of young idealistic college kids, one of whom falls under the weight of life's disappointments and eventually kills himself.  The film is about the events leading up to this suicide. But it's equally about the effect of Bresson's stark, monastic point of view reinforced by the super skinny characters, all in the simplest cut and design of clothing, who reveal no emotional excess. They moved simply, looking like line drawings, without any physical flourishes to distinguish one from the other. In fact, I often confused the characters since they dress, spoke and moved the same way. The monochromatic settings emphasized the overall sparse feeling.

Watching this film is either torturous, funny or moving depending on the viewer's mood and ability to let go of expectations. It's not Jurassic Park, but then it's also not like the more serious films we see either. It resembles the experience of going to a church or temple where the silence of the room and the busyness of your brain combine to create a new kind of reaction-  one which encourages a simple understanding of things, where your active life gets stripped down to basics.

Sometimes I laughed at the robotic, self conscious, over serious nature of Bresson's film; to be a dogmatic French intellectual in the 21st century feels as dated as a lava lamp.  Sometimes I almost purred over the beauty of his pared down film shots of objects, that reminded me of the artist Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings of bottles lined up to best capture the beauty of their form. Sometimes I was struck by the universality of our feelings of love, longing and loneliness no matter how old we are or what time in history we live.

                                                  Sartre, my Existentialist French Poodle

Lots has happened since I was an existentialist in college reading "No Exit" like it was the Bible. (Today the only sign of this interest is that my poodle answers to the name Sartre.)  But when I stopped trying to classify Un Diable and allowed the film's stark beauty and contemplative nature to wash over me, it didn't really matter what I called the film or myself anymore.  Even with the dour aspects of suicide looming over this movie, I left feeling like someone had just whispered to me in the gentlest of voices: pay attention.

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