L'Argent (1983)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

a young man is accused of passing counterfeit French franc notes and is sent to prison. his wife leaves him and his life spirals out of control in way that is totally believable. I kept thinking this could really happen. it's a very simple story, but a complex tale. there are many gaps in the film and I understand that is how the director Robert bresson does things. you are just expected to catch up with what's going on as best you can. it's a film where basic decency turns into monstrous results. it's a lot like Hitchcock. maybe better. one interesting thing I noticed was atm machines in France in 1981. I don't really remember them in nyc that early.

A Venice screening of Bresson's restored final feature, L'ARGENT, based on Tolstoy's short story THE FORGED COUPON, a BEST DIRECTOR winner in Cannes (an honor shared with Andrei Tarkovsky's NOSTALGIA, 1983), it is a rigidly modulated allegory delineates the shocking derailment of a man's moral compass with a provocative tail end.Injustice somberly unravels when Yvon (Patey), a young worker for the gas company, is unwittingly subjected to the receiving end of a counterfeit 500-franc note, which has been circulated from two schoolboys to a photography shop. After being caught using the note, Yvon's normal life starts succumbing to a downward spiral, it would firstly cost his job, then send him to jail as an accomplice of an ill-fated bank robbery, until his young daughter dies when he is locked up and his wife leaves for him to start anew. The tragedy couldn't be more harrowing to a working-class young man, but in Bresson's execution, which the whole feature is almost exclusively shot with a stationary camera, he unerringly fabricates a world of apathy enshrouding a brooding Paris, no off- hand "bonjour" among strangers or family members, attenuated by an almost robotic acting method from his amateur cast, what is projected upon us is a circle of mundane dishonesty and aloofness borne purely out of self-interest, where money, is the only currency that matters, certainly Yvon learns that in a hard way.So, after Yvon finishing serving his time, the only thing on his mind is to wreak revenge to this morally corrupt society with double even treble cruelty, homicide and theft impassively conducted. Ultimately, he perversely exacts his chilling last act of vengeance to a gray-haired woman (Van den Elsen), who is benevolent enough to take him in even after realizing what he had done, and her family, sending up Bresson's flaunting condemnation of the consequences when morality is lost, it also means the doom of humanity.Somewhat hard to swallow for its blatant savagery and waywardly defiant in its characterization and story-telling, L'ARGENT has been pristinely revived with its original luster to be appraised by new audience. At any rate, it strongly attests that Bresson had always been an unmitigated provocateur, from his budding career in 1940s, to his swan song four decades later, who had left a profound imprint on this art form with sheer consistency sans compromising his auteurist fidelity.

So, let me get this straight.I'm supposed to accept this film's technical failings as "art" sheerly because they are intentionally committed in the service of objectivity? Right.That's not art. It's an experiment and a bad one at that.I guess if you like manipulative, facile films, lap this one up. I dislike this genre of film whether the director is Bresson, Haneke, or Schlondorf.This makes Lars Von Trier's worst films seem opaque by comparison. It's films like this that make mass audiences shy away from any film that can be construed as an "art" film. And the fact that critics swoon over it only makes the case more damnable.

L'argent (1983) is nothing but a character study of an innocent man who turned in to a mass murderer.Follow him and study him when he was in household, prison, hotel, and lastly in old women's house. Ultimately he kills any one who comes into his obstruction.Lastly, he kills a generous old woman who was so kind to him just after asking"where's the money?The story is simple, but the content and the depth of the movie is not so simple as u may think.Every frame and dialogue has its own purpose and carefully filmed.I always believed Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky were two super genius of world's art cinema.Now I add Bresson as well after watching his "pickpocket" "Au hasard Balthazar" "Diary of a Country Priest" and this one L'argent.