L'Argent

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An old man walks down the street while reading a newspaper. He passes by a parked car in which our protagonist Yvon (Christian Patey) sits quietly and looks straight ahead. Several police cars speed by, sirens blaring. The old man continues walking until he sees three men, presumably police officers, crouching behind their cars, so still they could be sculptures: the old man hurries away. Across the street, a man (we cannot see who) comes out of a bank, holding a woman in front of him. One of the crouching men very slowly aims his gun.

We cut back to Yvon as he sits in his car still staring blankly; a single gunshot rings out off-screen; if Yvon hears it, he does not react. We return to the man retreating slowly back into the bank: who fired at whom and why doesn´t anyone seem to be panicking? We once again cut back to Yvon as a volley of gunfire rattles off-screen. He reaches slowly for the ignition and starts the car. We hold on a very long shot of Yvon´s hands on the steering wheel as more sounds play out: shouts, police whistles, etc. We finally cut to an exterior shot of Yvon´s vehicle as a police car pulls alongside him. Yvon, his expression still blank, shifts the car into drive and peels out.

It´s the strangest, most subdued bank heist you´ve ever seen on film; it is also a text book example of the defining techniques of Robert Bresson, one of the most idiosyncratic and remarkable directors in the history of film. At least three quintessentially Bressonian features are on display here. First, there is Bresson´s oft-discussed approach to acting. He employed non-professional actors, whom he referred to as "models," and trained them (often using multiple takes to tire them out) to perform as automatically and mechanically as possible: the goal was for the models to act without inflection, often resulting in the stoic, passive "Bresson face." For more discussion of Bresson´s use of models, please read my review of "Au hasard Balthazar."

Second, this scene offers an instructional lesson on Bresson´s revolutionary approach to sound. For Bresson, sound and image are often redundant, and if the two work together they do not necessarily reinforce each other but sometimes cancel each other out. If a sound conveys the essential meaning of the scene, there is no need to show a similar image. Therefore, when we hear the volley of gunshots and the whistles, we do not see the police shooting at the robbers but rather Yvon´s hands as they rest limply on the steering wheel as if awaiting further instructions from their master. As for what precisely occurs at the bank, we are left to wonder; in Bresson´s view, the ear is more imaginative than the eye, and sound is not merely the bastard child of image.

Third, Bresson´s emphasis on economy and precision ("L´Argent" runs at just 81 minutes) is evident in this scene. Bresson ruthlessly stripped away all extraneous elements from his films, until he was left with only the barest essential elements required to tell the story. After Yvon speeds away, we see a brief car chase which Bresson conveys by two primary images: Yvon´s feet as they switch from the accelerator to the brake and a shot of the police car as seen in the side mirror of Yvon´s car. Cut back and forth between these two shots a few times and… there´s your car chase. It is also worth noting that this is not merely economical from an artistic point of view but from a pragmatic perspective as well: Bresson seldom worked with big budgets.

These three elements (as well as others) defined Bresson´s films for the bulk of his career and combined to produced one of the most eccentric, hermetic and endlessly fascinating bodies of work in all of cinema. If Bresson had not perfected these techniques (how is such a thing possible?), he had finely tuned them by the time he directed "L´Argent" ("Money") in 1983. Bresson was 82 years old when "L´Argent" was released, and it was the last film the great French master would ever make. Bresson, who died in 1999, intended to continue directing, but was unable to secure financing for his long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis and he retired by the end of the 1980s. Fortunately, Bresson´s final film is also one of his greatest.

"L´Argent" is loosely based on the Tolstoy short story, "The Counterfeit Note" which also translates as "The Forged Note" or "The False Coupon." The story begins with two young men who pass off counterfeit bills to a local photography shop. The store owners discover that the bills are forged, but don´t want to get stuck with the loss so they, in turn, pass them onto Yvon Tage, the young man who delivers heating oil to their store. After Yvon is caught with the counterfeit money, he returns to the store with the police in order to prove his innocence, but the owners pretend not to recognize him. From this point, Yvon´s fate is sealed and his situation degenerates from bad to worse to unspeakable.

"L´Argent" traces the spread of evil from its first flowering to its final violent explosion. In true Marxist fashion, evil flows along the same path as capital. As the counterfeit notes change hands, they leave a path of destruction in their wake and leave nobody fully unscathed. In the opening scene, a young man asks for a handout from his father; in the climactic scene a murderous Yvon has only one question to ask: "Where´s the money?"

Bresson believed in predestination and Yvon is an innocent victim fated to be laid low by circumstances beyond his control. He is not merely falsely imprisoned but is actually transformed by the system; once released from jail, he decides he might as well become the person everyone seems to think he is. Bresson´s films were always considered to be pessimistic and grim, but "L´Argent" ramps that dark vision up to a new level. In many of Bresson´s films, the characters achieve a kind of grace or even redemption by way of their suffering, but there is little, if any, sense of redemption in "L´Argent," the ending of which is about as bleak as you will ever see.

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