L'Argent

"L'Argent" is Robert Bresson's very last film and a piece of work that went through a lot of financial problems to see the light of day. It was dismissed by many producers before being finally taken in hand by the Ministry of the Arts. At that time, Jack Lang was the ministry and his daughter served as a "model" for Bresson in the film where she is Yvette, Yvon's wife.

Sourced from a short story by Léon Tolstoï, "l'Argent" is first the assessment of a downward spiral for the main hero of the film, Yvon. Because he was given a forged note, this domestic oil delivery man will be caught in a chain of unfortunate events which will see him jailed, losing his cute, little daughter and wife before turning into a murderer. Through his decay, all forms of dishonesty, cruelty, injustice will be stated with money at their core, particularly in the first half of the film. Money is used for rewarding cowardice (the photograph who rewards his employee Lucien for his false evidence), for buying people's silence (Norbert's mother who gives the photograph's wife money to compensate her) and more generally, money is a God that makes Yvon's fate take a tragic dimension and drives a cruel, unfair world.

Its depiction is a perfect opportunity for Bresson to let his sparse, cold, neutral cinematographic writing shine. The more the film goes on, the more these epithets prevail with an accumulation of close-ups of objects, audacious elliptical sequences, a tightened editing and deliberately bland models who recite their texts and don't "act" it. Bresson's minimalist approach of this tragic story and harsh society amounts to a limpid harmony that inevitably brings an unshakable emotion and it's important to note down the moment when Yvon is put up by the old lady. These sequences are like lulls in Yvon's grisly fate and it's impossible to remain indifferent to the old lady's dreary way of life or when she's offered a few hazelnuts by Yvon. There's even a glimmer of hope when she pronounces the words: "I would forgive to the rest of the world".

It's true that Bresson's highly elliptical, straightforward style will leave many viewers baffled as there is no psychology or action but if you're sensitive to his unspectacular directing, you will realize that he pushed his art to the extreme to better get the audience involved in Yvon's woes. You can watch it only once but it will forever stay in your mind.

On a strictly formalist level, Robert Bresson's swan song, "L'Argent" (1983, France;which directly translates to "Money"), can be regarded as Pure Cinema. That is to say, no emotions, no actions, no music, none of such "artificiality" that has customarily been associated with cinema. At best, the film (and for that matter, Bresson's entire filmography) can be described as a Cinema of Ideology.

What is strictly at work here is the "idea" of how money can corrupt and destroy the human spirit. Surely, this can be derived from the Biblical concept of "money being the root of all evil" (Bresson's Christian upbringing being almost always discernible in his films). But this is not to regard this essential commodity per se as the reason for all things evil. Rather, at least in the film's context, it's a particularly forged 500-franc note that set in motion a series of unpleasant and unjust events, with this quiet and unassuming gas station attendant named Yvon Targe at the (abysmal) center.

As suggested from the preceding paragraphs, what concerns Bresson here is not the characters themselves or the milieu they are in (the actuality), as let's say the Italian Neo-Realism would have it, but the idea of how an unscrupulous act can be the cause of another person's undoing. This is humanism in its abstraction. Thus, watching the implications and complications of the counterfeit 500-franc bill upon the lives of the characters--or upon the life of Yvon--is like watching statuesque figures ("15th-century Christian icons", as some would politely have it) being callously manipulated by their blind fate, perennially condemned to be dragged along by the turning of its wheels.

And it is Bresson himself who is the prime mover of this "wheel". In his hands, the "force" of this fate is of such a cold, detached, unforgivably rational quality that one can unfailingly have the feeling of not being able to bear it all. From the initial simple act of the two schoolboys having to knowingly spend the counterfeit money at a photography shop, to the final harrowing act of Yvon having to commit a terrible deed in the name of and as a vengeance against the money (in a figurative sense), one senses Bresson as having the big hand in this cause-and-effect chain of events.

If one gets such a feeling, it's because the filmmaker (already 82 at that time) intended it to be so. As "L'Argent" is a specimen of Bresson's own brand of Pure Cinema, he absolutely wants his exacting vision and conception to be seen and felt in each and every scene, unhampered and uncluttered by the "standard" cinematic manipulations of stylized dialogue, fancy emotions, accompanying soundtrack and contrived actions. In this specific cinematic world, the filmmaker is the cinematic god himself whose fuel for his performers (non-professional at that) is mainly his idea of how cinema should be.

(In reference to one of his films, a reviewer noted that it is Bresson himself who is assuming the different characters in the film. Curiously, the above-noted film elements are what define, not in a derogative way though, Bresson's introductory feature film, "The Ladies of Bois du Bologne".)

This, in effect, gives an entirely purist level to the filmic conception of what it means to be an auteur, formally introduced to movie lexicon by the French New Wave, as pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard. "Purist", in that, whereas the New Wave pioneers can still "play" upon the above-mentioned filmic artificialities, Bresson the auteur is no different from being a sculptor or a painter or even a novelist. It's his own soul that seeps through his work. The product is distinguished by the singularity of its maker's personality.

What makes this singularly cold, clinical method even more pronounced is how Bresson's characters always find themselves drawn into the vortex of some kind of moral and/or spiritual crisis. The intellectual thief in "Pickpocket", the desolate young wife in "A Gentle Woman", the abused teenage girl in "Mouchette", the self-destructive youth in "The Devil, Probably", the contemplative priest in "Diary of a Country Priest", and now the quiet simpleton-turned-morally bankrupt murderer in "L'Argent". Bresson's rigorous and steely formalist cinema should just be the perfect stage for the dark night of his characters' souls. Grace is attained not without some form of sacrifice and damnation of the soul.

It is this ideology that fills the mold of this filmmaker's astonishing pure art. Unrelentingly dark and morbid, perhaps, but a flickering light of salvation can still be seen through it all.

This is only my second Bresson, the first being "Balthazar." That was rewarding in a sort of intellectual Norman Rockwell sense. This is not.

If you don't know Bresson, he's celebrated in some film communities for his economy, his approach to cinema that supports one view of what it means to be cinematic. I happened to see this on a day I also saw a Matthew Barney project and within near remembrance of a Tarkovsky.

Watching Bresson gives the same reward as reading one of those stories that omits any use of the verb "to be," or perhaps disallows a certain consonant, or maybe more radically forbids punctuation. You're impressed by the extent to which the artist understands the medium, well enough to negotiate his way around certain conventions. But the art isn't in the artifact, its in the method, the approach, the philosophy.

So if you watch this lucidly, you'll be confronted with that philosophy, and whether you really go along with it. Really, this is serious business, because such questions are the stuff out of which we define who we are not. Sure, its cinematic, but how is what matters.

Its a matter of taking away instead of adding, of closing instead of opening, in some way of the small, the slight — but in that, colored by the influence of the insignificant. Intimacies are always small, but loves can be big. Here, it is small, and gentle.

Make your choice.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

The plot simple and realistic: corruption to money. Usual from the Italian neo-realism movement. The worst was that acting was just not there. People were colorless and emotionless. They were living tragedies and none of them screamed, or cried(except one scene) or laughed at all. They were non humans! It was like reading a newspaper, a dry and with not soul at all journalistic article. I'm sure that Tolstoy's novel was not like this. The story reminded me movies of the Italian neo-realism movement, yet this one was not to be compared with some masterpieces of De Sica, Visconti etc...

Robert Bresson tells the story of a handful of people who are manipulated by greed for the key component of capitalism: Money (originating in the form of a counterfeit bill, I'll also tell you it's based fairly loosely on a Tolstoy novella "The Forged Note"). A disturbing series of events change the lives of a few individuals and signifies how such a system can rot a human being to their core. Emotionally I connected with this film very strongly, at some points it made me sit up in my seat and shake my head in amazement. However, Bresson's directing style is very different from most. He'll pause and hold moments in time expecting the viewer to stay with him. He'll also decide to leave out parts of a film that most would deem very important (generally, he avoids showing too many scenes that are similar to each other) which can be confusing. But when it comes to paying attention to this film, you'll get much more than you give... I go back to this movie every now and then and find something new to love about it. Rating? easily 10/ 10.