01 - L'Argent
Perhaps, in an era of excess and visual superlatives, the most daring thing is to be simple.
L’Argent, translated from French, means simply, “The Money,” a suitably stark title for Robert Bresson’s last film. It is a story that begins without a clear protagonist, focusing instead on the journey of a counterfeit bill across Paris and the chain reaction that follows from its changing of hands. We come to focus on the story of Yvon Targe, a simple, understated working class man who ends up the unintended and final victim of the false bill’s journey, yet far from the final victim from pursuit of money.
There is a lot written about Robert Bresson and his highly distinct style. I am trying hard to avoid the cliches one wants to resort to when describing his technique. It is not merely a style, sitting on top of a narrative, like seasoning on a roast, it is a way of seeing the world that impresses itself upon you. For a week after watching L’Argent, when I would walk into a room, or when I would look at the cutting board in my kitchen, a half cut onion and a knife resting on it, I felt I was seeing it through Bresson’s eyes. By this, a simple domestic scene can feel imbued with significance. That kind of power of perspective is hard to shake off.
L’Argent is one of the barest films in regard to exposition, and yet it never fails to be completely intelligible merely through the juxtaposition of images. A safe sits with its door open, it’s contents emptied. Cut to a man walking away with a briefcase; with this simple cut we know who has robbed the safe. Bresson seems to hate all sentimentality and melodrama. We are always coming into scenes in their aftermath, the camera, impassively observing the outcomes of violence. There is much here for a filmmaker to learn about the power of the viewer to make connections and associations between images and across cuts. In one sense this notion is fundamental to cinema, and yet it is notably absent in modern film, where all is blandly explicit. In L’Argent, emotion is withheld from us. In many earlier Bresson films I am alienated by this coldness, which feels like an unreal imposition for me, but the approach in L’Argent is perfectly calibrated to the subject matter. It is a style of omission and ellipses, expressionless faces, and the silent acceptance of fate; a notion totally alien to Hollywood convention.
I am drawn to L’Argent for its understatement. Modern image making is thoroughly shaped by digital processes that endeavor to give us total control over the resulting images. We obsess over the finest gradations of contrast, saturation, and hue in every image. Vignettes and face tracking contrast filters are added to accentuate nearly every shot in a modern film.
I am a product of my own time. I do not exclude my own work from this. I am still learning how to escape the conventions and techniques of our time which are so shaped by the toxic incentive of our modern patterns of attention seeking. Perhaps Bresson offers us hints of escape. Perhaps, in our era of excess and visual superlatives, the most daring thing is to be plain and simple.
Who would enjoy this film?
A viewer looking for something a bit less challenging might find an easier way into Bresson by watching “A Man Escaped.” The confined space of a prison cell, being well suited to Bresson’s minimal approach, makes it probably the most watchable Bresson film for a viewer accustomed to American genre conventions, and it is a personal favorite of my own.
L’Argent is based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy, “the Forged Coupon.” Bresson has a great affinity for the Russian literary tradition and is stylistically at odds with his more care-free countrymates of the French New Wave. I suspect this film would appeal to anyone fond of the immortal themes so prevalent in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. One image in particular, an axe held with the blunt side outward, the blade of the axe therefore, facing toward its swinger, recollects Raskolnikov and his own axe of fate. It is a devastating film in its analysis of humanity. The press conference from Cannes Film Festival, where L’Argent Premiered, is a nice way to slowly return to reality.
Where can I see it?
L’Argent is available for streaming on The Criterion Channel.
It is available on Demand and on Blu-Ray on Amazon