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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
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L’Argent (1983)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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L’Argent (French for money) was Robert Bresson’s last film before he gave up directing. The film is a brilliant, sobering look at the devastating ripple effect a single act has on people’s lives. The unstoppable, rigorous logic of fate has never had a better chronicler than Bresson. Here, his patented austerity reaches somewhat of an apex, as this deceptively simple tale — based on a Tolstoy short story called "The Forged Note" — unfolds in a straightforward, economic style. A story told mostly in visual terms, the dialogue is sparse, but Bresson’s camera embraces each gesture of his characters with such unflinching clarity that the film is almost voyeuristic in its approach. |
L'Argent |
The film begins as a young teenager asks his well-to-do parents for an advance on his allowance to repay a debt. His parents refuse him, and the unseen hand of fate has already started its inexorable motion. The boy goes to see a friend who gives him a counterfeit 500 franc note and suggests they buy something cheap and pocket the very real change. They go to a photography store and buy a small picture frame. The woman behind the counter reluctantly takes the note and gives the change, but when the shop owner returns, he immediately recognizes the bill as a fake. In fact, he has accepted two others and is getting mad about all the counterfeit bills. He decides to pass the bills off to a young delivery truck driver named Yvon (Christian Patey), who has no idea they are phony.
Yvon goes to a cafe and eats, but the waiter recognizes the forged notes and calls the police. Yvon takes them to the photo store and confronts the owner and his assistant Lucien (Vincent Risterucci) who both deny any knowledge of the bills. Yvon gets a lawyer who ultimately gets the case thrown out of court, but the incident has already lost him his job. Unable to support his wife and small daughter, he accepts a job driving a getaway car for a bungled bank robbery, is caught, and is sentenced to three years in prison. In prison, he receives letters from his wife telling him his daughter has died and she is leaving him for good. Yvon tries suicide.
Meanwhile, Lucien is fired by the store owner, and as retribution, makes a duplicate of the store keys and robs the store safe. Lucien then starts breaking into ATM machines, and when he is caught he is sent to the same prison as Yvon. Lucien tries to get Yvon to escape with him, but Yvon refuses and Lucien is caught. Finally released from prison, Yvon is a changed man, his soul deadened. Yvon finds himself with no one waiting for him and nowhere to go. What happens next is a surprising, yet logical turn of events best left for to the viewer to discover. Suffice to say the last twenty minutes of the very brief film, (it runs only 80 minutes) are disturbing.
It is not for all tastes but to watch it is to view cinema in a pure state, devoid of the artifices of Hollywood and its schematic approach to story telling. Bresson’s cinema is stripped to the bone; there is no music on the soundtrack, no extraneous camera movement, no indulgence of the audience. What we get is simply a series of events that play themselves out like events in a documentary - a nice approach to a film that is ultimately as critical of the bourgeoisie as any film of Buñuel or Pasolini. It is my personal favorite film of Bresson’s — I like it every bit as much as Pickpocket — and it is shocking that all the so-called critics who made all those lists of the best films of the '80s failed to even mention it. L’Argent is a masterpiece, an unforgettable film that uses the medium to show us how things get the way they do. Bresson offers no solutions, but his understanding of humanity is so chillingly acute that, after the film is over, one shudders at the very thought of any crime. And that is a noble use of film.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.