The Devil, Probably

“My sickness is that I see clearly.” Robert Bresson’s most controversial film (the French government banned viewers under the age of eighteen from seeing it, believing it would incite a rash of youth suicides) follows the journey of alienated teenager Charles (Antoine Monnier) as he searches for meaning in everything from religion and radical politics to drugs and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, all that may be left is the embrace of death. Made when the director was nearing eighty, this despairing yet undeniably resonant post–May ’68 manifesto is his deeply personal vision of the modern world as a spiritual wasteland, complete with footage of environmental degradation and nuclear destruction. No less an authority than Richard Hell declared it “by far the most punk movie ever made.”