L'ARGENT Movie Review

Money

In 1983, at the age of 76, France's Robert Bresson returned to the screen with an unexpected and undeniable masterpiece. A counterfeit 500 franc note is given to a delivery man by a store clerk. The man uses the bill, is arrested, and sees everything in his universe devastatingly altered as a result. Bresson's L'Argent (“Money”) is a portrait of how corruption taints not only the innocent but all who come in contact with the carrier; the inevitable downward spiral of so many lives as a result of one seemingly simple act is a precise and terrifyingly beautiful visualization of the progressively larger, rippling waves that are generated by casual, thoughtless sin. Watching L'Argent you're reminded of the Ray Bradbury story in which a man travels back in time and is warned against touching anything; he accidentally steps on a single butterfly, and when he returns to the present, the world has changed completely. Performed—as are all of Bresson's films—by a non-professional cast, and photographed in a stripped-down, uncluttered series of perfectly evocative images, L'Argent poses more questions that it can conceivably answer. The clear-eyed but open-ended vision of a master, L'Argent, based loosely on Tolstoy's The False Note, is a mesmerizing portrait of a universe the delicate balance of which can be tipped at any instant—with disastrous and unplanned results.

NEXT STOP … Pickpocket, The Earrings of Madame de…, Tales of Manhattan

1983 82m/C FR Christian Patey, Sylvie van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang; D: Robert Bresson; W: Robert Bresson; C: Pasquale De Santis. Cannes Film Festival '83: Best Director (Bresson); National Society of Film Critics Awards '84: Best Director (Bresson). VHS NYF, FCT