L' Argent [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Robert Bresson Robert Bresson

Overview

With minimal embellishment and great subtlety French filmmaker Robert Bresson's L'Argent is a powerful, moving and thought-provoking tragedy about a working stiff who is railroaded toward a bad end by the thoughtless machinations of a society obsessed with l'argent ("money" in French). Based on Leo Tolstoy's story The False Note, the mess begins with a pair of middle-class teen-aged counterfeiters. One of the boys is angry that his parents refuse to give him pocket money. He turns to his pal who gives him phony francs. In turn, the youth gives the money to a clerk in a local photo shop who passes it to his boss who quickly devises a scheme to get rid of it. As soon as the delivery man comes in, the shop owner hands him the bogus bucks and sends him on his way. Later the deliveryman stops at a local cafe and innocently pays his tab. He is immediately arrested. Meanwhile the shopkeeper attempts to keep the matter hush-hush. The mother of the boy behind it pays the proprietor to insure he stays silent. Still the truth eventually comes out and the hapless courier is acquitted. Unfortunately, though technically free, the scandal cost him his job. Unable to find another, and with a family to feed, the former deliveryman resorts to crime. He is functioning as a getaway driver for bank robbers, but the heist goes awry and he ends up serving a three year prison sentence. By the time he is finally released, his child has died, his wife has left him and he has no job and no money. With nothing else to lose, the ex-con becomes a cold-blooded killer and thief. When the film was first released in France, it generated political controversy among French conservatives because Bresson cast the daughter of the Socialist French Minister of Culture Jack Lang, Christine, for his female lead.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/11/2017
UPC:	0715515201117
Original Release:	1983
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Language:	English
Time:	1:24:00
Sales rank:	10,804

Special Features

Press conference from the 1983 Cannes Film Festival featuring director Robert Bresson and the film's cast; "L'Argent," A to Z, a new fifty-minute video essay by film scholar James Quandt; Trailer

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Christian Patey	Yvon Targe
Sylvie van den Elsen	Grey Haired Woman
Michel Briguet	Grey Haired Woman's Father
Caroline Lang	Elise
Vincent Risterucci	Lucien
Beatrice Tabourin	Woman Photographer
Didier Baussy	Man Photographer
Marc Ernest Fourneau	Norbert
Brune Lapeyre	Martial,Actor
Andre Cler	Norbert's Father,Norbert's Mother
Jeanne Aptekman	Yvette,Actor
Francois Barrier	Actor
Dominique Mullier	Actor
Jacques Behr	Actor
Gilles Durieux	Actor
Alain Bourguignon	Actor
Anne de Kervazdoue	Actor
Bernard Lamarche Vadel	Actor
Pierre Tessier	Actor
Eric Franklin	Actor
Jean-Louis Berdot	Actor
Yves Martin	Actor
Luc Solente	Actor
Valerie Mercier	Actor
Alexandre Pasche	Actor
Jean-Michel Coletti	Actor
Stephane Villette	Actor
François-Marie Banier	Actor

Technical Credits

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson	Director,Screenwriter
Antoine Gannage	Executive Producer
Jean-Marc Henchoz	Producer
Jean-Louis Ughetto	Sound/Sound Designer
Luc Yersin	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

Robert Bresson's last film, L'Argent is essentially about the ways in which money corrupts the human spirit, and begins with a shot of an ATM machine dispensing cash, an immediate indication that Bresson, though by then an old master, was still entirely in touch with modern civilization and its many mechanisms. Very loosely based on a story by Leo Tolstoy, the film's unrelenting narrative follows the path of a forged 500-franc note, from two schoolboys through a series of fraudulent transactions until, at length, it winds up in the hands of Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), a young worker who spends it at a café, not knowing that it is a forged note. Arrested for passing counterfeit money, Yvon loses his job, turns to crime, and gets arrested again. This time, Yvon goes to prison, and while he is in jail, his daughter dies. Released, Yvon takes to drifting aimlessly through the city, until he finds, at last, an elderly woman who seems to take pity on the lost soul and takes him in, with terrifying consequences. As with all of Bresson's films, L'Argent is superbly photographed, edited with razor-sharp precision, and enacted by a group of nonprofessionals who have been instructed to drain their movements of all emotion. It is the money that Bresson is interested in here, and the lengths to which people will go to obtain it. Bresson's Catholicism is readily apparent in the film, which is nevertheless perhaps the most fatalistic of Bresson's late works, with the implicit message that some harm simply can't be undone, or atoned for. In the film he made several years before L'Argent, Le Diable Probablement (1977), Bresson's fatalism was even more pronounced; authorities feared that the film essentially endorsed teenage suicide, and various attempts were made to suppress the film. L'Argent presents a world that is only superficially less grim, in which even kindness is often repaid with a blow to the head. Compelling, brilliant, and absolutely memorable, L'Argent is one of the key works in Bresson's canon, and absolutely essential viewing for anyone even remotely interested in the history of the cinema.

All Movie Guide - Wheeler Winston Dixon