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L' Argent

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3 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was, as it turned out, Robert Bresson's final film - he died last year, having spent the better part of the century making only fourteen feature films, most of which are truly remarkable. Fairly loosely adapted from a Tolstoy story, it starts off with a middle-class kid passing a forged banknote and ends in axe-murder. Bresson displays commendable artistic nous in avoiding the preachier, more moralistic bits of the original story (it's not one of Tolstoy's better tales) and concentrates instead on the man-made but nevertheless impersonal forces that conspire to drag the oilman Yvon from decent family man to murderer. (The murder itself is one of the most stunning, and yet most discreet sequences in the history of film.)

Bresson's usual crawling pace is sped up here, as there are so many stories and sub-plots to get through. Kent Jones, in his excellent study of the film, has observed that while Bresson has a wonderfully acute sense of what young people are like, he falls down a bit when he tries to depict the Paris underworld; but it doesn't matter, as this is a film with its eyes on bigger matters than documentary realism.

Bresson was at least 80 when he made L'Argent, and his uncanny sense of rhythm and timing were not at all dulled; the fairly gentle pace of the opening scenes accelerates into hyperspace before the end. L'Argent is about as far from the conventional crime picture is you'll ever get; the opening shot, of the metal screen of an ATM machine sliding shut, establishes the sense of inexorability. There are no Good But Troubled Cops, no Criminal Masterminds. Everybody in the film is humanly inexplicable, inexplicably human. When Yvon, at the film's visceral climax, asks the question "Where's the money?", it was Bresson himself who, in an interview, gave the answer: Everywhere. If only most directors' final films were as good as this.

It's amazing so few people know of Bresson's films; he's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. This film, his last, is brutally efficient in laying out his often bleak view of the world. Based on a Tolstoy story 'Le Faux Billet', it's an exercise in zero sum eliminative logic. The fact that the culprit (a conterfeit bill) is set in motion by playfully malicious youths and then the path is cleared by the greed and malice of their hypocritical parents is a beautiful setup for this dark meditation on the subjugation of human beings to their ruthless god.

The abstract mechnanized backdrop for the titles sequence is a money machine. As is so often the case, behind the deadpan performances of his nonactors (many of whom are superb in this movie), Bresson fetishizes on his subject unto hypnosis; in this film, notice how many times doors, small and large, are slamming, beginning with the automated one closing the first transaction, to the last image of a row of people gawking at the door. This film retains its searing impact through many viewings.

This is Bresson's greatest, and last, work. It is a work from a true cinematic auteur. No one made films like Bresson did, and I don't think anyone ever will. This film is based on a short story by Tolstoy entitled The Forged Coupon (aka The Forged Note), except Tolstoy's story is much different that Bresson's take here. It is about how a forged note of 500 francs passes from one hand to another, ruining the life of a fuel oil delivery man. Bresson made this film when he was 82, but you couldn't tell that it was made by a man that old. Quite often, critics assume that filmmakers (and artists in general) have nothing to say as they get older. On the contrary. They have even more to say. A real artist's vision deepens as they grow older. Kurosawa made Ran at 75, and Eastwood made Million Dollar Baby at 74. Those are their best films. Bresson is rather feisty and combative (which is a good thing) in the interviews presented here. He doesn't mince words, and he doesn't seem interested in doing the usual inane questions that featurettes on DVD's usually have from bubble headed reporters (even though these were shot for French TV, not Entertainment Tonight). He has something to say. This is my favorite film of his (even though Lancelot of the Lake and Au Hasard Balthazar are close behind). Sadly, he never made another one after this, but the 13 he did make are all brilliant. Not one bad one. Great film, great man...

This was the first Bresson film I saw and was by far the best. The languid and minimilistic style conveyed by Bresson takes some time getting used to, but its understating of the central theme is a powerful psychological device. Thematically, Bresson conveys to the audience the humiliation and inexorable decline of a working class man who was unfortunate to possess fake French Franc notes as a result of a petty and irresponsible joke initiated by middle/upper class schoolboys. The most patent disturbing factor of this film is how an ordinary, everyday working man, happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; this results in the young man going to jail & losing his family (including the heart breaking death of his baby whom he never saw). The effects are cataclysmic and tragic as the final scenes ensue. This is an excellent film which will sear the mind, heart and soul and will live and haunt you for the rest of your life. A must see.

L'Argent is a subtle film about class warfare. The story is deceptively simple -- it follows the journey of a counterfeit note as it changes hands-- but the examination of social attitudes and hypocrisies is quite thorough.
The forgers are two rich kids, they pass the note on to two middle class shopkeepers, and the shopkeepers pass it on to a working class truck driver. The corruption begins at the top of the economic food chain but the rich never pay for their crimes and so they commit them without even a second thought. The middle class is not as well off and so they are even more moneygrubbing than the untouchable and insulated wealthy and knowingly pass the counterfeit note on to an unsuspecting working class truck driver and then later lie about it in court. Its the working classes that pay for everyones crimes. Bresson is brilliant at keeping things simple. Many of his films are based on short literary works and so his films have an economy to them that is almost breathtaking. In the case of L'Argent Bresson takes a Tolstoy story and pares it down to the basics-- for Bresson the story is about the class struggle and how this system with its built-in hypocrisies and injustices dehumanizes and corrupts us all. The rich are seen to be callous and arrogant because untouchable, the middle class are seen to be petty and selfish, and the working class is seen to be easily victimized--merely fodder for those who happen to be higher on the economic bracket. Bresson does not fool around with character development or atmosphere, he stays focused on the essentails and thus the distilled quality of his films. In his early films he focused on alienated psychologies(Pickpocket, Diary of A Country Priest) but in his later films (Lancelot of the Lake, L'Argent) he focuses on society, and individuals are seen merely to represent types. The early films are more satisfying and richer and also more life affirming whereas the later ones leave you cold. What is consistent in all of his films is the utter perfectionism he displays with each shot. Bresson made such a small number of films because he took on average three years to make each one. Still he is not a film maker who will ever reach a large audience because his vision is so bleak. He does remain a favorite of true cinema fans and film makers; Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle are among his fans. Some people try and find affirmative messages in his films but only Pickpocket ends on a hopeful note. What sets his films apart is the sense that Bresson is devoted to finding the perfect visual style to convey his content. No other film maker does that better than Bresson.

Bresson has made some unparallelled films over a great part of the twentieth century. 'Balthasar' and 'Diary of A Country Priest', are right up there with my all time favourites. Friends try to convince me that 'Lancelot'(his excurison into colour) and,'L'Argent' are classics too. I can't agree. The narrative here is quite simple and the morality, so stripped back that it it feels like a Sunday School lesson.Even in 'Lancelot', where the acting was bereft of emoting, there was some degree of intimacy, that facilitated connections for me. Here, the characters are rendered as automatons, which is clearly part of Bresson's intention, but makes for some unreal, de-animated cause and effect. Interersting tale, artful photography, a bleak and discomforting fable. I wouldn't race out to catch this one, nor judge his contributions to cinema on the strength of it. He is undoubtedly in the Bunuel,Bergman, Dreyer, Tarkovsky,Kurosowa league.

There is so much baggage brought by critics to the work of Robert Bresson - his films are dramatisations of severe Catholic doctrines; his style is forbiddingly austere etc. - that is can put a lot of people off ever trying it. But if we concentrate on what's actually on the screen, we remember that Bresson is one of the great crime directors, his films more purely narrative-driven than any Hollywood thriller. The director to whom he is most often compared is gangster film maestro, Jean-Pierre Melville; like him, Bresson uses real Parisian locations as the setting for a restrictive plot where all extraneous elements are left out, where psychology and back-story give way to actions, giving the effect of an unreal, heightened, charged rite.

In 'L'Argent', crime and narrative are indistinguishable - the story begins with a petty crime and all subsequent events spiral out from it. Two teenagers pass off a forged banknote to a shop; the owner gives it to a serviceman, who is arrested for handling it. From these beginnings are engendered acts of armed robbery, perjury, fraud, suicide, serial murder. Lies and criminal acts are used to cover up lies and criminal acts. An 'innocent' man, with wife and child, is the one whose life is destroyed by the venalities of others.

If you didn't know Bresson was a Catholic, you might think 'L'Argent' was a Marxist film. The blank human characters, played, as usual with Bresson, by non-professionals, have less personality and active agency than the banknotes that magically drive the film's actions. Throughout, the camera privileges objects and decor, while humans are fragmented, reduced to impersonal limbs and actions, alienated from themselves and their labour, slaves to the commodity fetish. The fact that the blue-collar worker suffers most, while the middle class can paper over crime with money and more crime, increases this impression.

It is at this point the theology comes in. Bresson doesn't make films solely for Catholics. He presents a world which can be interpreted by any world-view, acting like a mirror of the viewer's life. If you do not accept Christian revelation and redemption, than this film will by unutterably bleak and meaningless. This is an appropriate response, suggesting your own life is just as bleak and meaningless, closed as it is to the promise of salvation. This promise and faith will give a different reading to believers; each shot and plot-point, no matter how depressing, will be imbued with relevance and purpose. The principle motif of the film is that of doors opening and shutting, from doorways to safes to ambulance doors to cell bars. This creates a stifling world of confinement, one where life is a prison, and not just in an actual jail. It is a labyrinth the character must negotiate, both social and moral. More positively, it is a figure for the soul, which must shut out ephemeral and selfish concerns, and open up to God.

As I say, you can accept this or not - murder leading to possible salvation sounds pretty monstrous, but this is also the basis for 'Crime and Punishment', and it is Dostoevsky, rather than the Tolstoy whose story 'L'Argent' is based on, that informs Bresson's art. But 'L'Argent' can be enjoyed on a purely aesthetic level, for the precise compositions, for the knife-sharp clarity of the editing, for the rhythm of the repeated images, for the film narrative constructed like music that disdains actual music, for the Godardian use of real sound. In Oscar Wilde's terms, 'L'Argent' is well written.

L'Argent is commonly hailed as Bresson's parting masterpiece, but sadly it's seriously undermined by atrocious performances and a completely unconvincing last reel. Which is a shame, because there's much to admire here. His adaptation of a Tolstoy short story about the disastrous consequences for the innocent recipient of a forged banknote has for the most part a terrific sense of narrative, exposing the way petty crime can have major moral repercussions throughout the social scale, with the rich able to buy or lie their way out of trouble. But oh, those performances! Bresson made a career out of soliciting convincing performances out of amateurs, so you have to wonder just why they are nearly all so very terrible here. Not only can they not act or give even the vaguest impression of life, intelligent or otherwise, but they move so mechanically - mannequin-like with back straight and arms down their sides like lead weights as they try to remember to hit their marks - that you wonder if Bresson actually intended the effect. Whether he did or not, it's like watching outtakes from a public information film at times, or the Swedish phrase book sketch from Monty Python. A couple of performers get by, but Christian Patey is so physically and verbally awkward in the lead that it's painful watching his progress, but in all the Wong ways.

Yet for 70 minutes at least the strength of the narrative and Bresson's spare, economical telling lend it a relentless forward momentum, manage to hold you. Tragically, the film's resolution fails to convince in any way, turning its initially fundamentally decent protagonist into a money-hungry thrill-killer not as a logical consequence of his experiences but purely as a plot contrivance to prove a point and provide an ending. The final (offscreen) mass murder simply seems tacked-on sensationalism, especially considering the absurd set of circumstances that places him in the bosom of the family he kills.

A good film but ultimately a frustrating and unrewarding one for all its strong points.

Paul Hunter's review says just about everything that I could about this film. It is truly an outstanding and thought provoking work. Paul Bresson's films are about as far from Hollywood as one can imagine. His films employ no name actors and are shot in a minimalist style that let the stories seemingly tell themselves, although clearly each shot has been framed with great deliberation. "L'Argent", as many of Bresson's films, deals with human tragedy. It depicts how it is possible for a good person to be turned by circumstances, mostly outside his control, into a murderer. It seems to say...don't sit their in judgement, until you have walked in another's shoes. This film could be the best case made for why capital punishment should be abolished. And, incidentally, capital punishment does not exist in modern day France.

Amazon.com is to be complimented for featuring Bresson's works in the March, 2000 "Art House and International" reviews. Hopefully these films will be released on less expensive DVD versions. It would also be great if Amazon.com is able to locate a DVD or VHS supplier of perhaps Bresson's greatest work, "Au hasard Balthazar"...a film that depicts every human emotion through the experience of a donkey.

I recently purchased L'Argent having read a few positive things about the movie. It is the story of greed run amuck. One spoiled brat passes a conferfeit French equivilent of a $100 bill and the misfortune that ensues affects many innocent people. The movie does an outstanding job of portraying the people involved and that has the effect of drawing both towards and away from the various characters. Some we will perceive as innocent and some as guilty as I think director Robert Bresson intended. This lesson in morality works well until Bresson takes a leap too far in making his point. Before we reach that extreme, however, we are convincingly reminded that innocence is not always rewared nor is guilt always punished. Bresson goes beyond that to such lessons as the poor being always at a disadvantage in court when challenging the rich and that love often doesn't conquer much of anything. Various characters end up in jail while other lose in other ways.

In regards to the end, I will give nothing away (I hope) but I feel the need to complain about the excessive conclusion that Bresson seems to want us to end up with. An innocent victim suffers one setback after another and he has our sympathy. However, what gets passed along from his hands to others is in no way a logical next step as the director would have us believe. Maybe others might think so. However, for me this leap of logic ruined the film's message. To paraphrase Cornelius Ryan, this was a misfortune too far.