I think that Robert Bresson (1901-1999) created some transcendent masterpieces during the 1950s in "A Condemned Man Escaped" and "Pickpocket." The only Bresson movie I saw in its original North American theatrical release was "Lancelot du Lac" (1974), which I found hideously boring. His last movie "L'Argent" (1983) received a best director prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, but sufficiently annoyed enough of the festival-goers that both the screening and the award ceremony were booed. Bresson's direction won the 1985 (US) National Society of Film Critics Awards. In his commentary track for the New Yorker DVD, Kent Jones (who wrote the BFI Modern Classics book on "L'Argent") recalls that the first US showing at the New York Film Festival was roundly booed and that someone in the audience during the screening yelled, "Show us their faces! Enough already with legs and belts."

Shots of the lower half of people's bodies was a stylistic tic of late Bresson, even more prominent, according to Jones, in Bresson's previous movie, "The Devil Probably" (1977). "L'Argent" only runs 81 minutes, but contains an inordinate number of shots of doors, as well as the legs of people walking. The introduction of its protagonist (most certainly no hero!), Yvor (Christian Patey) shows his hands finishing pumping gasoline and putting the hose back. Then the viewer sees his back as he goes through one of the movie's frequently filmed doors. Eventually, we see his face, a pre-Raphaelite one.

"L'Argent" has no
- actors
- acting
- verbal inflection (i.e., lines delivered with any feeling rather than in a sleepwalking monotone)
- music (even overheard, let alone a musical soundtrack)
- sympathetic male characters (it has two sympathetic female ones, who between them have perhaps 10 minutes of screen time)
- psychology (i.e.., exploration of motivation)
- sex or nudity

It has practically no action. This is remarkable in that the plot includes seven murders, three robberies, two getaways, a suicide attempt, and a prison break. Most of these occur offscreen. The two getaways are filmed as undramatically as possible. The one involving Yvor makes no sense to me. He is shown waiting to drive the getaway car. There is a lot of gunfire for him to hear. He pulls out and does not pick up any of the bank robbers, so I don't understand why he is being chased.

And it has minimal dialogue. As far as I recall, Yvor says nothing to his wife onscreen until she visits him in prison, a meeting in which she says nothing. I don't think he says anything to his cellmates or other prisoners. His cellmates read a letter he has dropped to find out what is troubling him while he lies disconsolate on his bunk. When one puts it back, Yvor turns and briefly looks at him, then, without saying anything, returns to the pillow. When he is in solitary confinement, he asks a guard the time and what day it is. During his release and after it, there is about ten minutes in which no one says anything.

And Jones wonders why people label Bresson "austere"!

It must be clear that "L'Argent" is not a candidate for a list of my thousand favorite films. There are elements that I find impressive in it, especially the prison visit scene (in which Yvor is practically effusive, especially in contrast to his general near-muteness), and pretty much all those with the older woman who takes Yvor in, knowing that he has committed murders (and has told her that he enjoyed them), Yvor neutralizing her watchdog.

Do I have to regurgitate the plot? For what Bresson did not intend to be his last movie, he adapted what Tolstoy probably did not intend to be his last novella, The False Banknote. In both, an unsuspecting man (Yvor/Ivan) received a counterfeit bill and the is accused of being part of a counterfeiting operation. This destroys his life. Yvor loses his job and then gets involved in the bank robbery (though, as I have already complained, I see no reason for his getaway car to be chased, since none of the robbers is in it), and sent to prison. Tolstoy's victim (Ivan) was murdered by Stefan, whose greed leads him to murder. Bresson eliminated Stefan and had Ivan (Yvor) turn into him. In Dosteoveskyan fashion, it seems to me that Yvor only goes through the motions of seeking and taking money, that the murders he commits are not means to an end (l'argent-the money) but an end, committing the ultimate crime to ensure damnation. (Bresson was raised in what I consider the very twisted Jansenist tradition, which easily linked to Dosteovesky's own twisted ideas about damnation and redemption...) "Where's the money?" does not strike me as an indictment of modern materialism, because I know—and I know that Yvor knows—that it is in the bank. Yvor first followed the old woman home from the bank where she had withdrawn cash he presumably plans to steal.

At the end, Yvor confesses the murders and robberies. A café crowd watches a team of policemen take them out. After the fiend and his captors pass, the crowd does not turn their heads to follow them, but continues to gaze into the room that the policemen and their captive have left. This is really an epitome of late Bresson: looking away from the action. Another director might have showed Yvor being placed in a police vehicle (there are extended frozen camera observations of prisoners being unloaded earlier on). Bresson shows his nonactor "star" passing through the frame, but not only does not follow him, but violates what I know about human nature (loving to gawk) by having the crowd not follow him with their eyes. (As in the last scene of Kurosawa's last movie, Madadayo, this is almost too fitting—though both of them hoped and planned to make more movies and did not know it was going to be the final scene in their oeuvre.)

Although I find the story repellent and more than a little arbitrary and the antidramatic presentation frequently annoying, I can't say that I was bored (as I was by "Lancelot du Lac"). But I was also not exhilarated, as I was by "A Condemned Man Escaped" and "Pickpocket." It's not that I think Bresson didn't know what he was doing in his last movies, but that I don't like what he was doing.

There is nothing voyeuristic about the violence in "L'Argent," not least in that none of it is shown (well, some crockery breaks and a lamp is axed, but the first two murders have to be inferred from redness in the water than pools in a sink before going down the drain. For all Bresson's fascination with hands, he did not even show the hands from which blood was being washed off.

The slaughter of a somewhat extended family is shown by their dog discovering corpse after corpse. However, as soon as Bresson showed Yvor looking at an ax in the shed where he was staying, I knew how it was going to be used, so Bresson could have dispensed with even showing the corpses and the upset dog.

And I think that the dissolution of Yvor's category would be more credible and interesting if he was shown to have one at the start of the proceedings. He is trusting and unwilling to defend himself at the outset, but even though he is the victim of those knowingly passing counterfeit bills, the road to becoming a mass murderer seems a literary abstraction to me (the punishment of society for sacrificing an innocent to avarice).Being "railroaded" turns innocent men into killers in noir movies, but they go after those who framed them, not those who shelter them. It has been said that Bresson's overriding interest was to disclose the secret inner life of his characters. After watching "L'argent" twice (once with commentary track), I have no insight into the inner life of any of the characters in it. This is part of why I (and those who booed film festival screenings in 1983) find it unaffecting.

The New Yorker DVD has an outstanding audio transfer and a pretty good visual one. The first bonus feature is a brief (1:30) clip of Marguerite Duras praising Bresson's genius (it is perhaps a Bressonian touch that she is shown silent almost as much as she is shown talking). There is a half-minute trailer showing nothing but shots of an ATM.

There are two 1983 television interviews, totaling 19 minutes, of Bresson (who rarely granted interviews and disappointed me by backing out of coming to the retrospective of his films and receiving the lifetime achievement award of the San Francisco Film Festival in 1988). In them, he did not say much specifically about "L'Argent," but explained his focus on sound as Truth (whereas photographs lie, he claimed) and why he used nonactors after "Les dames du Bois de Bologne" (1945). He said he loved actors—on stage, where artificiality and simplification are expected. But, he claimed, actors cannot be "natural." Considering that those who appear in Bresson movies often seem like puppets of the author's concepts, I find this ironic. And I am completely certain that naturally occurring human speech is not as flat as what Bresson demanded. The number of takes he shot to get exactly what he wanted is legendary (a hundred for one line in "Pickpocket").

He also claimed in both interviews not to have everything planned out, to be open to being surprised. He said that he storyboarded his movies in advance, but did not look at the storyboards when shooting or editing them. I can believe that, but have difficulty crediting that what he shot was not meticulously planned beforehand.

I've recently heard old interviews with Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica about working with nonactors. Both of them were looking for faces. Bresson said that was not what he looked for in casting. Rather, he chose those who struck him as having "a moral resemblance to the character." Hmmmm!

In the commentary track Kent Jones emphasizes Bresson as an observer of things (including automated teller machines) and ways of doing things (Yvor's introduction, the physical details of the escape in "A Condemned Man Escaped" and of the skills in "Pickpocket") rather than Jansenism. I wish that he had stuck more to commenting on what is on the screen, which would seem the tribute of emulation to Bresson's specificity than Jones argues is central to Bresson's greatness. There are way too many "You know"s. The stretches in which Jones says nothing are shorter than those in which Yvor does not speak, but still considerable. (His book on "L'Argent," which I have not seen, reputedly has meticulous shot-by-shot analysis that he perhaps did not want to repeat.) I found it useful in understanding at least one sect of Bresson worshippers.

For a more reverential (or at least appreciative) take than mine on "L'argent," see Metalluk's review, which includes extensive discussion of major themes in the movie. Although, clearly, Bresson showed a working-class protagonist victimized by the greed of middle-class characters (and later taking out his rage on other middle-class characters). Bresson himself proclaimed that "L'argent" is "about today's [1983] unconscious indifference when people only think about themselves and their families. But it is not an anti-bourgeois film. It is not about the bourgeoisie, but about specific people. I am a bourgeois myself. I simply happened to have observed people like that. That’s what I like about the Tolstoy story. People from other classes can behave in the same way, for the love of their children. They are not intrinsically evil, but their behavior has evil consequences." Like the aged Tolstoy, the aged Bresson thought the world was becoming horrifyingly materialistic and money-oriented. What would they make of Tom DeLay's America?



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