Director
Robert Bresson

Cast
Yvon: Christian Patey
Other cast:
Sylvie Van Den Elsen
Michel Briguet
Caroline Lang


L'argent is a deceptively simple film, based on Tolstoy's novel The Counterfeit Note, and follows the path taken by a quantity of forged money and the effects it has on those through whose hands it passes.

The notes are originally passed from a schoolboy, who, disgruntled at his parents' refusal to give him money, accepts forged notes from a classmate, to a photographic shop owner who realises later that they are forged, and passes them to an unsuspecting fuel delivery man, Yvon. The latter is arrested when he unwittingly tries to pass the fake money on to a restaurateur. Yvon tries to clear his name, but the photographic shop owner denies ever having met Yvon before. Ultimately sent to prison, Yvon's downward spiral continues when he loses first his child, then his wife, and upon his release, appears to have nothing to live for, transformed from once-happy father and husband to chillingly brutal, angry and self-pitying.

This 1983 work was Bresson's final film, and in it, he returns to one of his favourite themes, corruption and the contagious effects of greed. While he frequently stated that his films were about hope and inspiration, in L'argent in particular, this can be difficult to define. It is a deftly composed crime story executed with understated utility, which tells its ruthless tale in pianissimo, despite the conclusion to the sequence of crimes trailed by the narrative ending in a double murder. Indeed, Bresson's approach to this brutality is typically restrained, and is all the more potent for it - it is horrific and disturbing precisely because the audience is shown the absolute minimum, leaving the rest to the - ultimately more horrifying - imagination.

At its simplest, L'argent is an elaborate chain of cause and effect, the ripples of a selfish act resulting in the moral and social collapse of a proud man, and Bresson presents every link in that chain with precise, cold clarity. L'Argent does not present much opportunity for hope, but there is powerful sense of loss and sadness in this portrait of a society so obsessed with money that it loses its humanity, and it remains a superbly effective and remarkable piece of cinema.