L'ARGENT (Bresson, 1983)
New Yorker Vido, DVD, Release Date May 24, 2005 (currently out-of-print)
Review by Christopher S. Long
(The greatest director in the history of cinema was born Sep 25, 1901, or maybe 1903, or maybe he just always was. My review of his final masterpiece was originally published in 2005 and has been substantially revised for reposting today. I know a lot more about Bresson now than when I first wrote it, but I wasn't too far off. At least I knew it was awesome. My apologies for not having good screenshots for the first scene I analyze in detail but, well, I don't have them. You'll just have to watch the movie.)
An old man walks down the street while
reading a newspaper. He passes by a parked car in which our
protagonist Yvon (Christian Patey) sits quietly and looks straight
ahead. Several police cars speed by, sirens blaring. The old man
continues walking until he sees three men, presumably police
officers, crouching behind their cars, so still they could be
sculptures: the old man hurries away. Across the street, another man
(we cannot see who) comes out of a bank, holding a woman in front of
him. One of the crouching men very deliberately aims his gun.
Cut back to Yvon as he sits in his car
still staring blankly; a single gunshot rings out off-screen; if Yvon
hears it, he does not react. The man retreats cautiously back into
the bank: who fired at whom and why doesn’t anyone seem to be
panicking? Cut back to Yvon once again as a volley of gunshots
rattles off-screen. He reaches slowly for the ignition and starts the
car. Hold on an extended closeup of Yvon’s hands (always hands with
Bresson) on the steering wheel as more sounds play out off-screen:
shouts, police whistles, etc. We finally cut to an exterior shot of
Yvon’s vehicle as a police car pulls alongside him. Yvon, his
expression still blank, shifts the car into drive and peels out.
It’s the strangest, most subdued bank
heist you’ve ever seen on film, and it is also a text book example
of the idiosyncratic style of the great French director Robert
Bresson. At least three quintessentially Bressonian features are on
display here. First, there's Bresson’s oft-discussed approach to
acting. He employed non-professional actors, whom he referred to as
“models,” and trained them to perform as automatically and
mechanically as possible, often using multiple takes to wear them
out: the goal was for the models to act without inflection, often
resulting in the stoic, passive “Bresson face.” For more
discussion of Bresson’s use of models, please check out my review
of “Au hasard Balthazar.”
Second, this scene offers an
instructional lesson on Bresson’s revolutionary approach to sound.
For Bresson, sound and image are often redundant, and if the two work
together they do not necessarily reinforce each other but sometimes
cancel each other out. If a sound conveys the essential meaning of
the scene, there is simply no need to show a similar image as well.
Therefore, when we hear the volley of gunshots and the whistles, we
do not see the police shooting at the robbers, but rather Yvon’s
hands as they rest limply on the steering wheel as if awaiting
further instructions from their master. As for what precisely occurs
at the bank, we are left to wonder; in Bresson’s view, the ear is
more imaginative than the eye, and sound is not merely the bastard
child of image.
Third, Bresson’s emphasis on economy
and precision (“L’Argent” runs at just 81 minutes) is evident
in this scene. Bresson ruthlessly stripped away all extraneous
elements from his films, until he was left with only the barest
essential elements required to tell the story. After Yvon speeds
away, we see a brief car chase which Bresson conveys by two primary
images: Yvon’s feet as they switch from the accelerator to the
brake and a shot of the police car as seen in the side mirror of
Yvon’s car. Cut back and forth between these two shots a few times
and… there’s your car chase. It is also worth noting that this is
not merely economical from an artistic point of view but from a
pragmatic perspective as well - Bresson seldom worked with big
budgets.
These three elements (among others)
defined Bresson’s films for the bulk of his career and combined to
produced one of the most distinct, hermetic, and endlessly
fascinating bodies of work in all of cinema. If Bresson had not
perfected these techniques (how is such a thing possible?), he had
finely tuned them by the time he directed “L’Argent” (“Money”)
in 1983 at the age of 82, and it was the last film the French master
would ever make. Bresson, who died in 1999, intended to continue
directing, but was unable to secure financing for his long-planned
adaptation of the Book of Genesis and he unofficially retired by the
end of the 1980s. Fortunately, Bresson’s final film is also one of
his greatest.
“L’Argent” is loosely based on
Tolstoy's short story “The Counterfeit Note” which also
translates as “The Forged Note” or “The False Coupon.” The
story begins with two young men who pass off counterfeit bills to a
local photography shop. The store owners discover that the bills are
forged, but don’t want to get stuck with the loss so they, in turn,
pass them onto Yvon Targe, the young man who delivers heating oil to
their store. After Yvon is caught with the counterfeit money, he
returns to the store with the police in order to prove his innocence,
but the owners pretend not to recognize him. From this point, Yvon’s
fate is sealed and his situation degenerates from bad to worse to
unspeakable.
“L’Argent” traces the spread of
evil (flowing by the same route as capital) from its first flowering
to its final violent explosion. As the counterfeit notes change
hands, they leave destruction in their wake and nobody escapes fully
unscathed. In the opening scene, a young man asks for a handout from
his father; in the climactic scene a homicidal Yvon has only one
question to ask: “Where’s the money?”
Bresson believed in predestination (or
maybe not – it's a thing critics have often written but it's a lot
more complex than that) and Yvon is an innocent victim fated to be
laid low by circumstances beyond his control. He is not merely
falsely imprisoned but is actually transformed by the system; once
released from jail, he decides he might as well become the person
everyone seems to think he is.
Bresson’s films are often considered
to be pessimistic and grim, but “L’Argent” ramps that dark
vision up to a new level. In many of Bresson’s films, the
characters achieve a kind of grace or even redemption by way of their
suffering, but there is little, if any, sense of redemption in
“L’Argent,” the ending of which is about as bleak as you will
ever see. Except maybe in “Au hasard Balthazar.” Here you can
choose from two Bresson quotes: one in which he described himself as
a “jolly pessimist” and another in which he rejected the term
“pessimism” as applied to his films, preferring the term
“lucidity.”
Like most of Bresson’s films,
“L’Argent” accumulates its remarkable affective power through
its puritanical restraint. Yvon remains an opaque figure with a blank
expression even as he transforms from an innocent into a killer. We
could easily imagine the Hollywood version of the same story with a
classically-trained method actor raving and gibbering and chewing the
scenery with dramatic music to underscore the transition, but Bresson
does not pursue that route. Nor does he linger on any of the typical
gory elements. As he does in the car chase, Bresson simply picks a
few objective details and deploys them to convey an entire scene.
Bresson’s tendency to elide the main action is so pronounced in
“L’Argent” that even an attentive viewer might miss altogether
the fact that, in one sequence, Yvon murders two hotel owners. The
ending is all the more potent and unnerving because of the sense of
clinical detachment cultivated by Bresson; we are all invited to
consider the proceedings with the dispassionate eye of a coroner
rather than as a sympathetic and involved viewer.
We do not quite know why Yvon does what
he does or why he selects his victims, though it is obviously related
to his unfair treatment by society. Bresson’s cinema is one of
surfaces, not psychology – which is to say it's grown-up cinema.
Character is revealed only through behavior, not through exposition
or analysis; there are no “character moments” offered as a sop to
the audience, and Yvon’s sudden decision to cross the line into
violence comes as a shock as we have not been prepared for it as we
might expect. Bresson provides the what; the viewer, if he or she
simply must, provides the why.
Video:
The film is presented in its original
1.78:1 aspect ratio. I have the old VHS released by New Yorker and
the difference in image quality (even setting aside that the VHS was
full screen) is like day to night. On the tape, the desk in the
opening scene is dull brown and the curtains are gray; on the DVD,
the desk is cherry red and the curtains much brighter. The flesh
tones on the DVD really pop out as well. Of course it's no Blu-ray,
and a transfer that felt like a “revelation” in 2005 is found
wanting more than a decade later. Still, it's perfectly fine... until
we get something better and I'm thankful that New Yorker took the
effort to release some of Bresson's great work on DVD in North
America.
Audio:
The DVD is presented in Dolby Digital.
I don’t think any DVD can fully preserve the quality of Bresson’s
rich and textured sound tracks but this version does a more than
creditable job. he music and dialogue are clearly separated, and the
sound effects are well-mixed. Optional English subtitles support the
French audio.
Extras:
The main attraction is a commentary
track by critic Kent Jones who literally wrote the (BFI) book on
“L’Argent.” Jones’ commentary is enjoyable not just because
of his keen insights, but also because of his halting, nervous
delivery filled with awkward pauses – it adds a very personal
touch. Jones blends an academic approach with his obvious love for
the film and delivers one of the more lucid and engaging commentary
tracks I have ever heard. If anyone ever asks me for my favorite
commentary track, this one would be right up there with Spinal Tap's
in-character commentary.
In addition to a very short trailer,
the disc also includes three short interviews: two with Bresson (6
min. and 13 min., respectively) from French television in 1983 and
one very brief one (1 min, 30 sec.) with director Marguerite Duras
who expresses her admiration for the great director.
Final Thoughts:
Is “L'argent” the greatest final
film by an esteemed director? I can't think of one definitively
superior, and Bresson was indisputably still at the top of his game
in his early eighties. Like most Bresson films, “L'argent”
encourages multiple interpretations and a whole gamut of reactions.
Even devoted members of the Bresson cult often disagree with each
other about various takes: “Yes, this film is great, but you are
completely wrong about the reasons why!” Which is just one small
part of the pleasure of experiencing the work of a true one-of-a-kind
artist.
