by Allan Fish
(France 1983 84m) DVD1/2
Aka. Money
Pour cinq-cent francs
p Jean-Marc Henchoz d/w Robert Bresson story “The False Note” by Leo Tolstoy ph Pasqualino de Santis, Emmanuel Machuel ed Jean-François Noudon m Johann S.Bach art Pierre Guffroy
Christian Patey (Yvon Targe), Sylvie van den Elsen (grey-haired woman), Michel Briguet (her father), Caroline Lang (Elise), Vincent Risterucci (Lucien), Beatrice Tabourin (shop owner’s wife), Didier Baussy (shop owner), Marc Ernest Fourneau (Norbert),
It would turn out to be Robert Bresson’s final film, made when he was 81 years old, but still with over 15 years life left ahead of him. It’s a tantalising thought, of a man who lived so long, till he was 98, making only 12 films. Each of them has been claimed by various critical groups as a masterpiece, but how many more could he have made? It’s a nagging doubt one has about so many master directors who one might have perceived to have wasted time – Kubrick, Malick, even Buñuel who did nothing for the best part of two decades when he should have been in his prime. Of course quality counts more than quantity, and Bresson, like Dreyer, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Cocteau, Von Stroheim and Vigo, should be remembered for what he did rather than for what he didn’t. His is arguably the most epiphanal career in film.
L’Argent recalls Marcel l’Herbier’s identically titled but thematically antipodean silent from 1928. Thematically it recalls his own Pickpocket and also, paradoxically, the causality-themed work of Max Ophuls. It starts with a schoolboy in debt. For what, we’re not sure, but when his parsimonious father refuses to give him the money he needs, he accepts the help of a classmate who tells him to pass off a forged 500FF note at a store. They go to a photo shop and pass it off to the storekeeper’s wife, and their troubles are seemingly over. From there, rather than report the matter, as it’s happened several times, the store owner tries to pass off all the dodgy notes himself to a delivery driver, who is then caught trying to pay with one of the said notes in a restaurant. The restaurant manager has him arrested and the driver, Yvon, tells them where he got the notes from. The shop owner persuades their assistant to lie for them under oath in court, which helps them get away with it but sees Yvon’s name cast in the mud. Having lost his job, he reluctantly accepts a job as a driver on a robbery, only for it to go pear-shaped and him get sent down for three years. In this time, he makes plans to escape, but finds a criminal rage building up in him that flowers monstrously in the final act.
It’s taken from Tolstoy’s story, but no doubt that Dostoyevsky is as close to Bresson’s heart as ever he was. As always with Bresson, the figures are deliberately passive as they never would be in real life, lending an almost religious intensity to the proceedings that, miraculously in some ways, makes it all the more affecting to watch. It’s not all about Yvon either, for the other players in his dance of death with fate also keep reappearing in the story, either coming a-cropper or putting the unsavoury episode behind them. There’s no loyalty in love here either, with Yvon’s wife deserting him rather than stay with him. The hope of the loving caress through the bars at the end of Pickpocket is extinguished ruthlessly.
Visually the film is as minimalist as ever, with regular collaborator de Santis bathing the film in a distinctly neutral rinse not dissimilar to that employed by Henri Decaë in Melville’s Le Samourai. The performances are virtually non-existent, completely subservient to the director’s vision, while the script deliberately avoids any form of judgement of the characters, letting the story tell itself. It’s a cynical film in many ways, especially for Bresson, the film of one with seemingly no hope for mankind as he contemplates his own mortality; even the protagonist’s name is a play on words with the French word avantage, as if indicating how so many characters in today’s society are only interested in getting ahead, and doing everything for their advantage.
by Allan Fish
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Yes-I liked this one. The passing of the notes, how their presence comes to indicate their greedy fates are like a whirlwind in the first third of the film. I agree that the performances are virtually “non-existant” but Bresson has bigger fish to fry in theme and morals. Like Kubrick, I never had a problem with “what could have been”. I’m just glad that the world had a guy like this living in it. At 81, Bresson proved that art is something in the blood. Art is instinctual, we cannot fight its need to be created. It comes as no surprise, when you look at a film like this, that the proof of art as an extension of the individual is absolutely true. He can not fight art or turn his back on it. Art must be. Bresson, like Kubrick and Malick and many of the others Allan has discussed all share a common thread. They had no choice.
This is Bresson’s final masterpiece, and as he did actually live to 99, his twelve career films were painstaking projects that were realized to perfection of an uncompromising director. Yes, MADAME DE comes to mind immediately here, but Allan hogged up that reference! Ha! L’ARGENT is actually based on a short story by Tolstoy, and it returns to the terrain of PICKPOCKET and the themes of crime and redemption. The prison here is a metaphor for the soul. Bresson creates a harrowing, caustic and socially relevant indictment of materialism and amorality, and in many ways as Allan broaches in his review its a bleak and despairing work.
L’Argent dispalys the filmmaker at a high level of artistry, especially his use of narrative ellipses, close-ups and fragmented space. Also, the film provides Bresson an opportunity for artful manipulation of the soundtrack. Passing streetcars, the crackle and jingle of money, the tinny roar of mopeds, the ringing of registers, the screech of sirens and whistles, and prison echoes are all rendered in precise and vivid terms.
In the critical ranks there are conflicting views. (paraphrased by Anna Dzenis from a volume on Bresson by Kent Jones): The differences are instructive. While some writers such as David Thomson approach Bresson with ‘unbounded awe’, others such as Pauline Kael, describe him as a filmmaker ‘whose career went into decline after the making of Pickpocket’ – a filmmaker best characterised by terms such as ‘austere’, ‘severe’ and ‘ascetic’, while Paul Schrader described Bresson as a ‘transcendental artist’. In opposition to this idea of ‘transcendence’ critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that Bresson was not a religious artist at all, but an artist of ‘immanence…where the inside is always revealed by remaining on the outside’, an artist whose style has ‘grown.. out of a concrete and material historical experience’. Yet others respond solely to the formal elements, regarding Bresson as a grand stylist whose cinema is about the very essence and purity of cinematic language. chronological unfolding. And the third is a detailed study of the last 23 minutes of the film – a segment which Jones claims is one of the most sublime, ‘psychologically acute’ segments in all of Bresson’s cinema.
L’ARGENT in the end is more than an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella, a film about money, and an investigation into ‘the way evil spreads’. It is about the world in which these things happen – a film about the sensual, tactile, materiality of objects in the world and the human experience of them. These felt impressions include the ‘surprise of cold, steel’ cash machines, the ‘hard, snaking sound of a recoiling hose’, the ‘omnipresent buzz buzz of traffic’, people walking down the Grands Boulevard, the tall metal gates of a prison opening, wine glasses breaking, clothespins clicking on the line, arms pressing down on a pitchfork and tongs cutting through packed soil.
Pasquelino de Santis is a master stylist who has done some magnificent work for Zeffirelli, and Bresson uses his fine color modulations to great effect here in L’ARGENT, one of his few color films.
“In opposition to this idea of ‘transcendence’ critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that Bresson was not a religious artist at all, but an artist of ‘immanence…where the inside is always revealed by remaining on the outside’,”
I find this a curious formulation, as immanence IS a religious concept. Rosenbaum’s focus on immanence does not deny the religious content of Bresson’s universe, but rather shifts its focus from one religious conception (more or less Western) to another (largely, though hardly exclusively, Eastern) I say this not to be anal, but feel I must inevitably counter Dzenis’ (Jones’?) assertion as the piece I’m working on for The Dancing Image right now has at its heart the conflict between immanence and transcendence. I do agree, though, that in Bresson’s supposedly Catholic universe an outside “transcendent” God is curiously absent. The struggle with faith and the universe does tend to occur inside the person as an existential conflict, rather than in relation to an outside force, even when the subject is a country priest.
I suppose this is the Jansenist in Bresson – as my limited theological understanding has it, Jansenism incorporates Protestant notions of free will and leaps of faith into the “focused on works” notions of Catholicism: i.e. it focuses to an unusual extent (for Catholicism) on the inner struggle.
That’s all for now, as I’m playing truant from the aforementioned post, which needs tending if it is to meet the 5:00 deadline.
This would make my best of the 1980s list if I actually wrote one. It’s a formidable statement that stands as a damning final judgment on the modern world if not humanity in general. I understand the comments about Bresson’s minimalism, but given his views on “cinematic writing” L’Argent doesn’t really strike me as a minimalist film, given all that Sam well describes going on in the film.