L'Argent | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

L'Argent ****

by Eric Henderson on June 12, 2005 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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A director with as supple a foundation of cinephilic adoration as Robert Bresson is bound to inspire a lot of Olympian proselytizing, among auteurist converts and heretics alike, about the galactic elemental clarity of his filmmaking, spiked with as many buzzwords as possible such as "unforced," "simple," "open-ended," "spiritual," "philosophical," "earthy," "humane." It's almost to the point that reading about Bresson you'd imagine that his films are composed of shots of nothing but koi ponds, cala lilies, creamy, hemp-textured canvases, loaves of bread, or whatever else has become shorthand for cinematic transubstantiation. Which is why a film like L'Argent, which is admittedly unforced, open-ended, and humane (and, to throw in one further Bresson cliché to boot, excises any trace of narrative fat and works it to the bone), hits with the effect not so much reflecting a cleansing of the soul, but rather a ransacking.

Based on a Leo Tolstoy novella, the story feeds the notion of fate through a stringent, Rube Goldbergian social machinery that results in the destruction of a fuel truck driver's livelihood and sanity (or does he actually gain some strange new clarity?) preceding a series of homicides; and it all seems to stem from the innocuous chicanery of two schoolboys and their forged Franc note that the employees of a camera shop try to pass off on the driver, named Yvon, who later gets nailed by a coffee shop waiter. With the same sort of amplification of violence and respect for the laws of chance that brings to mind Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," L'Argent is like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer recited in iambic pentameter.

Bresson might work with a minimum of details (though even to say that is a mistake, because almost everything that is included in the film is a detail, and each one is all the more resonant for its presence as a chosen object), but his narrative momentum and editing rhythms are surprisingly speedy, never giving any of the characters any time to contemplate an alternate course of action that might alleviate some of their melancholy. The only character that exhibits the capability to anticipate the flow of circumstances (at least up until the justly celebrated penultimate countryside sequence, when "motivation" becomes unnecessary and impure) is the character of Lucien, the fey altruist-criminal and camera shop cashier whose lies on the stand in court are what initiate Yvon's descent. His motivations always align with what will end up benefiting him the most at that particular moment in time—precisely the opposite of Yvon, who is the scapegoat of the cosmos—which surfaces in a mass of contradictions (his actions seem ultimately out of a self-interest that, in an odd way, endorses the idea that each individual's strategies require it—something driven home by how often characters are shown in isolation from one another) and moral relativism that Yvon is incapable of.

Which brings Yvon to the film's finale, in which the film seems to posit his massacring of a farmhouse family under similarly relativistic terms. It's a horrible act, no doubt, but at the same time he's mercy killing in nearly every case (i.e. duty-bound and -binded housewife, old drunk ex-pianist, crippled kid) and his return to the jailhouse institution that "reformed" him means more refining down the line. Additionally, Bresson's oblique framing and extremely delicate editing (keeping the actual violence of the murders off-screen with ellipsis and insert shots of an alarmed family dog in the same manner that the editing of Yvon's violence against the coffee shop employee and the country wife passively receiving a slap to the face both dance around any actual on-screen violence) become such a vivid example of "pure cinema" that we half expect the gathered onlookers of the film's final "open-ended" shot are paying respect to the aesthetic beauty of Yvon's crime as they are rubbernecking a police arrest. Ultimately, L'Argent manages to convey coherence between rigid moral dogma and sympathetic multiplicity. It's mind-blowing.

Director(s): Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Cast: Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline Lang, Sylvie Van den Elsen, Béatrice Tabourin, Didier Baussy, Marc Ernest Fourneau, Bruno Lapeyre
Distributor: Cinecom International
Runtime: 81 min.
Rating: NR
Year: 1983