Very well executed

A Disappointing Continuation

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A Venice screening of Bresson's restored final feature, L'ARGENT, based on Tolstoy's short story THE FORGED COUPON, a BEST DIRECTOR winner in Cannes (an honor shared with Andrei Tarkovsky's NOSTALGIA, 1983), it is a rigidly modulated allegory delineates the shocking derailment of a man's moral compass with a provocative tail end.Injustice somberly unravels when Yvon (Patey), a young worker for the gas company, is unwittingly subjected to the receiving end of a counterfeit 500-franc note, which has been circulated from two schoolboys to a photography shop. After being caught using the note, Yvon's normal life starts succumbing to a downward spiral, it would firstly cost his job, then send him to jail as an accomplice of an ill-fated bank robbery, until his young daughter dies when he is locked up and his wife leaves for him to start anew. The tragedy couldn't be more harrowing to a working-class young man, but in Bresson's execution, which the whole feature is almost exclusively shot with a stationary camera, he unerringly fabricates a world of apathy enshrouding a brooding Paris, no off- hand "bonjour" among strangers or family members, attenuated by an almost robotic acting method from his amateur cast, what is projected upon us is a circle of mundane dishonesty and aloofness borne purely out of self-interest, where money, is the only currency that matters, certainly Yvon learns that in a hard way.So, after Yvon finishing serving his time, the only thing on his mind is to wreak revenge to this morally corrupt society with double even treble cruelty, homicide and theft impassively conducted. Ultimately, he perversely exacts his chilling last act of vengeance to a gray-haired woman (Van den Elsen), who is benevolent enough to take him in even after realizing what he had done, and her family, sending up Bresson's flaunting condemnation of the consequences when morality is lost, it also means the doom of humanity.Somewhat hard to swallow for its blatant savagery and waywardly defiant in its characterization and story-telling, L'ARGENT has been pristinely revived with its original luster to be appraised by new audience. At any rate, it strongly attests that Bresson had always been an unmitigated provocateur, from his budding career in 1940s, to his swan song four decades later, who had left a profound imprint on this art form with sheer consistency sans compromising his auteurist fidelity.

"You have me on your conscience. You have to answer for that now." So states our innocent main protagonist to the guy who sent him to jail. People tend to misconstrue the sage adage of money "being the root of all evil" when, in actuality, it is the love of it that is so. Managing money is one of the many important facets of what has been placed within our means and is not to be taken lightly. It is also an enormous responsibility to be taken into emphatic consideration. Does this film play out as the saying 'cold-hard cash' infers? Let's take a look.'L'Argent' is a 1983 French drama directed by veteran writer/director Robert Bresson (Pickpocket, Au Hasard Balthazar). Based on Leo Tolstoy's 1912 novella 'The Forged Coupon', it was Bresson's last film, though he passed away in 1999, but earned its creator the Director's Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. A young man enters his father's study to claim a monthly allowance, as his father obliges. But the son presses for more, citing a school debt he must pay as the father dismisses him. An appeal to his mother fails as well. Taking matters into his own hands, he pawns off his watch to a friend, of whom, rather than paying him back, provides him with a forged five-hundred franc note. The slip is then brought into a photo shop where the young man is on the pretext of purchasing a picture frame. When the store co-manager discovers the fake, he scolds his partner for her lack of wariness. She in turn rebukes him in turn for accepting two forged notes the previous week. Vowing to pass off all forged bills in their possession at the next opportunity, enter Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), a gas man of whom, in his hand, holds a bill. Upon leaving, he goes to eat at a restaurant, beginning a formidable turnaround in a deadly game that chose him as a pawn rather the other way around when he tries to pay the tab.What follows afterwards is the slow but gradual descent into the corruption tangled in a web of scandal, deceit and shattered innocence as Yvon is now a culprit of unfortunate circumstances far out of his control. Arrested, but avoiding jail time, he loses his job, leading him to be the get-away car driver for a bank robbery when desperate for money. Arrested and sentenced for three years doing time, while incarcerated his daughter dies and his wife writes she is leaving him to start a new life. Upon release, Yvon has nothing. Enraged and bent on revenge against the world, he murders hotel keepers, robbing them of their till, and hides out in a house of a kind woman and her family,and, after some time passes, one night kills everyone with an axe. Going to a restaurant, he confesses his crimes to an officer, leading, once again, to his arrest.The end of the film is what makes this movie. Poetic throughout yes, and then the rage of an empty man torn of his will to live for a dynamic ending of blood and the inner cry of needless loss of the average working-class man and his world chewed up and spat in the dirt. 'L'Argent', along with actual money, shares its value in that it can indeed convey a flavorless sojourn down a road few or less are willing nor wanting to travel from the invisible power it so emanates from its green, lifeless form and feel aimed, in this picture, at an innocent but nonetheless damned soul. The film does show, however, that money is the character study, and that crime and punishment can be as cold and clinical of what many people so badly want to obtain which in return might just be their ultimate downfall if not preceded with extreme caution. What starts with a few bourgeois teenagers involved with counterfeit bills whose parents don't give them the money they want all unfortunately backfires on a simple, unsuspecting man just of whom was just living a normal life with a family that is sadly no more, revealing now the bleak, colorless world of court rooms and prison cells therein. A powerful, harrowing and fitting swansong for the then eighty-two year-old director, 'L'Argent' meticulously but honestly reveals the value not only of its eponymous title but also that of the redemption of the human spirit in a world gone hellishly awry. As CPEA states in a review from Time Out: "this is a return to the extremes of crime and punishment that Bresson last used in Pickpocket; and as in that film, crime is a model of redemption and prison a metaphor for the soul".

On the DVD for the film L'Argent, it's writer/director Robert Bresson says that he dislikes his films being called "works", because he sees each films as being a sort of "striving" or attempt towards something more and more perfect with cinematography and so on, and most specifically to strive towards truth with what's up on the screen. It's an interesting position to see from the film's own creator, because the truth as presented in L'Argent is that really of repression. It's not just the characters, or particularly the actors portraying them, or the deliberate flow of shots in a scene of violence or physical altercation or something that should be run of the mill in a crime movie. It's the society itself, and even in the subtler ways the mechanics of society, of money as well, drive along people, especially when they do wrong. Like other Bresson pictures, L'Argent is interested in man's conscience and what it is to go over the line of what makes one guilty or not based on the cruel fates of such a society, only this time even more restrained and- as the word gets thrown around so often- detached.But I would be a little hesitant to label it outright as detached. Bresson's definitely no Scorsese, let's make that clear, and one's not going to get a camera movement that jolts you in your seat. On the other hand there's a level of low-key engrossment in the material. It's not very easy to get through, to be certain, as Bresson is all about both subtleties and hitting you over the head with the message, although not seemingly so much with the latter. His story comes from a Tolstoy short, and it seems fitting for a man who's masterpiece, A Man Escaped, also dealt with the feelings of dread against a clockwork structure where any and all feeling comes in smaller doses. The protagonist, Yvon, gets handed a twist of fate with some counterfeit money, and gets put to jail after taking a deal on a job that leads to a car crash (perhaps the one and only time, ironically of course, that Bresson probably tried an action scene like this). After a stint in prison, where coming face to face with the man originally responsible for putting him in there via the counterfeit money only brings a sense of loss in lacking revenge, he goes through a murder spree.But a murder spree, of course, as Bresson would only do, where omitted details are all apart of the mis-en-scene and in adding an emphasis on the aftermath more-so than the actual grisly details of what goes on in the moment. There's even a moment towards the end of something out of Sling Blade, only here not so much out of the simplicity of the mind from knowing right or wrong but from the simplicity of being numbed by the experience: the lack of a conscience. Yvon is the kind of criminal that never gets shown in movies, and rightfully so. He doesn't fit into a comfortable mold, and it will be a little sluggish for some viewers, even in an 81 minute running time, to see the usual Bresson tactics going on; likely many, many takes to wear down the already non-professional actors, and this time stuck in a near-rigid control of Bresson's in an emphasis of camera over performance. As one critic pointed out, it's more like 15th century icons than usual 'actors'. And, truth be told, it's not quite as fascinating as A Man Escaped or Pickpocket because of Bresson making it tougher to get into the detachment of the main character (the lack of narration may be attributable to this, or the simple fact that perhaps Tolstoy is a hard literary nut to crack).But as his final film, it's a good "attempt" that does progress ideas about the truth behind criminal acts, and the society that tries, convicts and houses them (there's an great little moment showing how the prisoners have to pick up their suitcases before going into the prison), and how 'normal' citizens also have a kind of repression that comes out in spurts, like with the old married couple who take in Yvon late in the film (the shot of the slap is significant, tying into Bresson's visual scheme of such acts being too easy to show on film). It's an intellectual stimulator, at the least, even as it does resist anything extremely favorable as an emotional effort. It's slightly cold and assuredly dense, but worthwhile for a certain kind of movie-goer.

I just wanted to make a quick comment regarding the comment of suekendall about l'argent. L'argent is one of Bresson's biggest masterpieces. A merge of minimalism and strong observation. And as for the actors in l'argent, they are not wooden, they are real. Bresson made frequent use of non-performers to give his film a certain authenticity. I think he succeeded in every aspect. It is a ground breaking film which taught the viewer that it does require very little to create a story. Bresson works demands the viewer's imagination. Moreover, for everyone who has a keen interest in cinematography, this film is a must. Bresson truly succeeded in making the most economic and sensible use of the camera.For everyone who does not like the film, there will be other films to enjoy...but for everyone who is willing to enter Bresson's world, this film is a true eye opener about film, art and humanity.