"You have me on your conscience. You have to answer for that now." So states our innocent main protagonist to the guy who sent him to jail. People tend to misconstrue the sage adage of money "being the root of all evil" when, in actuality, it is the love of it that is so. Managing money is one of the many important facets of what has been placed within our means and is not to be taken lightly. It is also an enormous responsibility to be taken into emphatic consideration. Does this film play out as the saying 'cold-hard cash' infers? Let's take a look.
'L'Argent' is a 1983 French drama directed by veteran writer/director Robert Bresson (Pickpocket, Au Hasard Balthazar). Based on Leo Tolstoy's 1912 novella 'The Forged Coupon', it was Bresson's last film, though he passed away in 1999, but earned its creator the Director's Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. A young man enters his father's study to claim a monthly allowance, as his father obliges. But the son presses for more, citing a school debt he must pay as the father dismisses him. An appeal to his mother fails as well. Taking matters into his own hands, he pawns off his watch to a friend, of whom, rather than paying him back, provides him with a forged five-hundred franc note. The slip is then brought into a photo shop where the young man is on the pretext of purchasing a picture frame. When the store co-manager discovers the fake, he scolds his partner for her lack of wariness. She in turn rebukes him in turn for accepting two forged notes the previous week. Vowing to pass off all forged bills in their possession at the next opportunity, enter Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), a gas man of whom, in his hand, holds a bill. Upon leaving, he goes to eat at a restaurant, beginning a formidable turnaround in a deadly game that chose him as a pawn rather the other way around when he tries to pay the tab.
What follows afterwards is the slow but gradual descent into the corruption tangled in a web of scandal, deceit and shattered innocence as Yvon is now a culprit of unfortunate circumstances far out of his control. Arrested, but avoiding jail time, he loses his job, leading him to be the get-away car driver for a bank robbery when desperate for money. Arrested and sentenced for three years doing time, while incarcerated his daughter dies and his wife writes she is leaving him to start a new life. Upon release, Yvon has nothing. Enraged and bent on revenge against the world, he murders hotel keepers, robbing them of their till, and hides out in a house of a kind woman and her family,and, after some time passes, one night kills everyone with an axe. Going to a restaurant, he confesses his crimes to an officer, leading, once again, to his arrest.
The end of the film is what makes this movie. Poetic throughout yes, and then the rage of an empty man torn of his will to live for a dynamic ending of blood and the inner cry of needless loss of the average working-class man and his world chewed up and spat in the dirt. 'L'Argent', along with actual money, shares its value in that it can indeed convey a flavorless sojourn down a road few or less are willing nor wanting to travel from the invisible power it so emanates from its green, lifeless form and feel aimed, in this picture, at an innocent but nonetheless damned soul. The film does show, however, that money is the character study, and that crime and punishment can be as cold and clinical of what many people so badly want to obtain which in return might just be their ultimate downfall if not preceded with extreme caution. What starts with a few bourgeois teenagers involved with counterfeit bills whose parents don't give them the money they want all unfortunately backfires on a simple, unsuspecting man just of whom was just living a normal life with a family that is sadly no more, revealing now the bleak, colorless world of court rooms and prison cells therein. A powerful, harrowing and fitting swansong for the then eighty-two year-old director, 'L'Argent' meticulously but honestly reveals the value not only of its eponymous title but also that of the redemption of the human spirit in a world gone hellishly awry. As CPEA states in a review from Time Out: "this is a return to the extremes of crime and punishment that Bresson last used in Pickpocket; and as in that film, crime is a model of redemption and prison a metaphor for the soul".
'L'Argent' is a 1983 French drama directed by veteran writer/director Robert Bresson (Pickpocket, Au Hasard Balthazar). Based on Leo Tolstoy's 1912 novella 'The Forged Coupon', it was Bresson's last film, though he passed away in 1999, but earned its creator the Director's Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. A young man enters his father's study to claim a monthly allowance, as his father obliges. But the son presses for more, citing a school debt he must pay as the father dismisses him. An appeal to his mother fails as well. Taking matters into his own hands, he pawns off his watch to a friend, of whom, rather than paying him back, provides him with a forged five-hundred franc note. The slip is then brought into a photo shop where the young man is on the pretext of purchasing a picture frame. When the store co-manager discovers the fake, he scolds his partner for her lack of wariness. She in turn rebukes him in turn for accepting two forged notes the previous week. Vowing to pass off all forged bills in their possession at the next opportunity, enter Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), a gas man of whom, in his hand, holds a bill. Upon leaving, he goes to eat at a restaurant, beginning a formidable turnaround in a deadly game that chose him as a pawn rather the other way around when he tries to pay the tab.
What follows afterwards is the slow but gradual descent into the corruption tangled in a web of scandal, deceit and shattered innocence as Yvon is now a culprit of unfortunate circumstances far out of his control. Arrested, but avoiding jail time, he loses his job, leading him to be the get-away car driver for a bank robbery when desperate for money. Arrested and sentenced for three years doing time, while incarcerated his daughter dies and his wife writes she is leaving him to start a new life. Upon release, Yvon has nothing. Enraged and bent on revenge against the world, he murders hotel keepers, robbing them of their till, and hides out in a house of a kind woman and her family,and, after some time passes, one night kills everyone with an axe. Going to a restaurant, he confesses his crimes to an officer, leading, once again, to his arrest.
The end of the film is what makes this movie. Poetic throughout yes, and then the rage of an empty man torn of his will to live for a dynamic ending of blood and the inner cry of needless loss of the average working-class man and his world chewed up and spat in the dirt. 'L'Argent', along with actual money, shares its value in that it can indeed convey a flavorless sojourn down a road few or less are willing nor wanting to travel from the invisible power it so emanates from its green, lifeless form and feel aimed, in this picture, at an innocent but nonetheless damned soul. The film does show, however, that money is the character study, and that crime and punishment can be as cold and clinical of what many people so badly want to obtain which in return might just be their ultimate downfall if not preceded with extreme caution. What starts with a few bourgeois teenagers involved with counterfeit bills whose parents don't give them the money they want all unfortunately backfires on a simple, unsuspecting man just of whom was just living a normal life with a family that is sadly no more, revealing now the bleak, colorless world of court rooms and prison cells therein. A powerful, harrowing and fitting swansong for the then eighty-two year-old director, 'L'Argent' meticulously but honestly reveals the value not only of its eponymous title but also that of the redemption of the human spirit in a world gone hellishly awry. As CPEA states in a review from Time Out: "this is a return to the extremes of crime and punishment that Bresson last used in Pickpocket; and as in that film, crime is a model of redemption and prison a metaphor for the soul".