Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski's The Devil is a swirling, chaotic nightmare of a film. Set in 1793 during the partitioning of Poland by foreign powers in the wake of the French Revolution, it was no doubt conceived as a deliberate missive to Poland's anti-intellectual, censorious communist regime of the 1970s. See this article by Samm Deighan from Diabolique Magazine for a brief overview of the political situation in Poland in the 1790s and the 1960s.
The Devil may have been intended as an incendiary political statement, but it can still be enjoyed by the 21st century viewer lacking knowledge of its original context. To this viewer, The Devil is a delirious, disorienting, absurd, sickening, frustrating descent into madness.
The film opens with its most chaotic scene. A mysterious man in black rides into a convent overrun by invading troops. Within its walls is a nightmarish imagining of the chaos of war, as prisoners writhe on the ground, madmen scream and wail, nuns cavort hysterically, defeated soldiers lay dying and invading ones rape and pillage.
Held prisoner in the convent is our hero Jacob, awaiting punishment for assassinating (or attempting to assassinate?) the king of Poland. The man in black frees him, while inexplicably murdering his accomplice Tomasz. Sending with him a young nun, the man in black tells Jacob to 'go home' and sends him off on horseback.
From there the film's delirious plot ensues, as Jacob wanders aimlessly between a few locations in the Polish countryside. The man in black (perhaps the titular Devil himself) reappears at opportune moments to punctuate the narrative, offering Jacob madcap bits of advice, recrimination, or encouragement. The pretty young nun seems to serve as a counterpoint to the Devil figure, as perhaps one of the only characters occupying a space of apolitical innocence.A sort of guardian angel to the Devil-plagued Jacob.
Jacob encounters a troupe of actors performing Hamlet in the woods, but refuses to join them. He encounters some of his fellow conspirators having a dainty little soiree in a castle, and discovers that an old friend of has stolen his girlfriend. Hysteria ensues. This seems to be the first of many blows to Jacob's strained psyche that sets him on the road to insanity.
Visiting his childhood home he finds his life turned even more upside down. His father has committed suicide and his body has been laying in bed for who knows how long (and over which a midget sits playing a Jew's harp. Why not?)
He discovers that he has a half-brother, who wears his dead father's clothes, and who has been having an incestuous relationship with his sister. He discovers that his hitherto absent mother was a prostitute, pays her a visit at her brothel, and for some reason nearly consummates this new relationship before revealing his identity as her son. Because why not throw some Oedipal conflict into the pot. Driven further into madness, he murders a prostitute with a straight razor.
From here Jacob wanders between the actors in the woods, his home, and the castle. He is nearly crucified, he has sex with a Turkish actress in the woods, murders several more people, has a homosexual encounter with the leader of the actors, kills his sister and half-brother, burns his house down, and is eventually shot in the face by the Devil figure. This is not before the Devil reveals that all he was after the whole time was Jacob's signature on a document affirming that he helped prevent conspiracy against the new government of Poland.
Upon showing some officials this document and being paid but rebuffed for being 'immoral', the Devil freaks out and suddenly rapes the nun, who castrates him in flagrante delicto with Jacob's straight razor. He runs bleeding through the woods, dies, and transforms into a (dead) black dog. There is a particularly unsettling moment (somewhat reminiscent of The Wolf Man) where we see the Devil part way through his transformation.
So it's all very straightforward, you see?
Zulawski was a masterful auteur filmmaker, achieving great artistic heights with later works like the sublimely hysterical Possession. I have no doubt that The Devil was a very deliberately constructed piece of art, but I for one would require several more viewings to parse more meaning out of this, other than what I can gather by reading about its political context. The search for meaning here is frustrated by the fact that Zulawski seems to deal in confusion, absurdity and hysteria as rhetorical devices. Characters issue grand statements about politics, philosophy and life, but they are delivered in a garbled, nonsensical, chaotic fashion. Sequences of dialogue seem to move from one non-sequitur to the next with no logical thread (this is not helped by what seemed like poorly translated subtitles). Characters collapse and thrash around in the dirt for no apparent reason. The camera work is dizzying, swirling around the characters, sometimes being spoken to directly in a first person perspective and then suddenly moving aside the action. Much of the dialogue is screamed or growled. On the whole it is a uniquely nightmarish vision with a unique aesthetic of squalor, sickness, and chaos.
And it is not without moments of beauty. The grainy film stock and the bleak, frozen Polish landscape lend the film an ethereal, doomed beauty.
The Devil. It will challenge and frustrate you. Maybe it will make you feel sick. But don't let it pull its greatest trick and convince you it doesn't exist. See it if you can.
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