It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe a film directed by Robert Bresson, the French auteur most recognized for making austere, anti-dramas. But his final feature film, L’Argent (1983), loosely inspired by the first part of Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Forged Coupon, is filled with the kind of dramatic incident that populates nearly all of Hitchcock’s films.
The story begins with Norbert, an affluent young boy, forging a 500-franc note because his father refuses to give him extra pocket money. With the help of his friend, Norbert convinces the co-manager of a photo frame shop to accept the counterfeit in return for legitimate change. Upon finding this out, the co-manager’s irate partner decides to pass this note, along with two counterfeit notes that he had mistakenly accepted, to another person. He does so the next day with the help of his assistant manager, Lucien (Vincent Risterucci), to Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), an honest man delivering heating oil to them. Unaware that the notes are counterfeit, he uses them at a restaurant. The waiter recognizes this and calls the police to get Yvon arrested. What follows from thereon is a ruthlessly efficient morality tale about the collapse of all morality: Bresson parallelly charts Lucien’s rise to the top and Yvon’s fall from innocence by showing the former committing numerous frauds and the latter getting caught up in the vicious cycle of theft, deceit, and murder.
In other words, the film is all plot, with the littlest of time spent dwelling on what one would call boring asides. Why, then, does L’Argent, even more than Bresson’s entire oeuvre, feel so (intentionally) dead, devoid of even the genre thrills provided by the austere slickness of the prison escape sequence in A Man Escaped (1956) and the handily orchestrated pickpocketing sequences in Pickpocket (1959)? For one, L’Argent, unlike these films, avoids character exploration and interiority. The film’s initial movement from one dramatic moment to the next is not limited to a single character, so we are unsure as to whose life we are following in the first place. Is it Norbert, Lucien, or Yvon? Bresson does not stop to specify who, out of these three, is our central character, undermining any potential we might have had to identify with any of them. Even when it eventually focuses on Yvon, there’s a distinct inexpressiveness to Patey’s already reserved performance. Bresson has always been associated with treating his actors as models, but in L’Argent this effect is exaggerated two-fold: the performances themselves are unnaturally stiff, and the director refuses to give his characters a voice(over), further undermining any agency they might have at least tried to establish in his earlier work.
They remain pawns to the film’s action, which, in and of itself, feels casually and chillingly routine. Aberrations like theft, deceit, and murder are not aberrations like in Pickpocket or A Man Escaped; they’re the norm in L’Argent. Bresson documents them with the same surgical precision he employed to document the suicidal nihilism of young Parisians in The Devil, Probably (1977), a film that functions as an encapsulation of youthful malaise post-May ’68. His sense of resignation with the world at large — the lack, if you will, not just of character redemption, but even the possibility of it — pushes his already stripped-down aesthetic to bare-bone extremes, resulting in a film whose gut-wrenching hopelessness derives not from all the action that happens on screen, but from the tragic inevitability of it all.
Take, for instance, the two “high stakes” heist sequences that Bresson de-dramatizes. In the first one with Lucien, he emphasizes the moments before and after he robs his bosses. In other words, when he is getting ready to commit said crime and when the store managers discover their shop’s alarm ringing. Bresson blanks the action of Lucien robbing the store itself, draining the catharsis associated with him committing that crime. Yvon’s heist is, in some ways, treated more conventionally: Bresson does, in fact, give us a car chase! How does he shoot it, though? By rhythmically alternating between close-ups of Yvon’s foot pushing the accelerator and shots of the rear side view mirror for 10 seconds. There’s nary a wide shot that functions to establish the scene’s geography; it only does so when Yvon crashes into another car approaching his, almost as if it was destined to do so.
Bresson doesn’t just underline his character’s lack of choice here, but his total lack of chance. The faded beige color of the counterfeit note — doubly emphasized in The Criterion Collection’s minimalist poster of the film — has overwhelmed everything to such an extent in L’Argent that every human hand appears tainted by it. No gesture of life — the dramatic, the boring, or the dramatic-rendered-boring — holds any value in front of it, and Bresson’s unsentimental depiction of this makes it all the more devastating.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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