L' Argent

This is not my favorite Bresson film, but it is one of them. Here Bresson shows every imaginable form of corruption and betrayal in order to display the tainting of innocence.

While I don't remember all the details (and there are many of them), the jist of the film has stayed with me. A level headed, blue collar man stops to get change from a store. He is working, driving his truck, doing nothing wrong. Unfortunately, he is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He receives bills from the shop which are counterfeit. Two young men, pressed for cash, had been in earlier and managed to pass the fake bills off as real ones. The point of this scene is that there is no point; this commonplace man does something that all of us have done a million times, and not only is his life destroyed as a result, he plays a significant part in that subsequent destruction. The film could be seen either as a tragic series of events with no sense behind them (again, Bresson puts the stress on meaninglessness) or as the potential criminal hiding within us all.

Sitting at a restaurant, the man pays for a meal with the false money he has been given. The waiter calls him a thief, and the man naturally takes offense, shoving the waiter into a table. These scenes, in which the spirit of revolt overcomes the man's rationality, are shot in still (as on the cover of the video itself), and are intended to represent the pride of innocence when encountered with injustice.

From there, everything goes seriously downhill. In an ironic, terrible twist, the man ends up in prison with one of the young hoodlums who help put him there. Having lost his family, his job, his reputation and his freedom, a silent fury (which we do not see until the end) builds in the man until he becomes a complete outsider, committing an unspeakable act at the end and confessing to it.

The extraordinary aspect of this piece by Bresson is that one cannot help but be haunted by the very viable and real possibility of these events. The only unbelievable part is the man's willingness to snap to such a degree. The irretrievability of the man's innocence, his life, and his ultimate fate is even more agonizing: nothing he could do would return him to his ordinary life. Watching this film is like watching a lamb go to the slaughter, resurrect itself and slaughter everyone else.

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.

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.