Product Description

Robert Bresson's final masterpiece, L'Argent is a stunning protest against greed and corruption. A boy's parents refuse to lend him money, so a friend gives him a counterfeit 500-franc bill. This one act sets into motion a chain of events that will lead to murder.

The bill passes from hand to hand, and with each exchange comes another betrayal. To protect themselves, shopkeepers pass the bill on to an unsuspecting delivery man, Yvon, who is arrested and sent to prison. Rejecting the world that ruined him, Yvon turns to crime and destruction.

Inspired by a Tolstoy story, one of cinema’s great masters creates a powerful tale of innocence corrupted.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80782 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-05-24
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: French, Latin
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Amazon.com
Robert Bresson always claimed his films are about hope and redemption, but so many end in death or suicide that it's a struggle to reconcile the statement with his films. His final film, based on Leo Tolstoy's story The Counterfeit Note, is no different. It's the harrowing tale of an innocent man, Yvon (Christian Patey), whose victimization at the hands of an arrogant upper-class delinquent and a greedy shop owner sends him on a downward spiral into a life of crime. The once-happy husband and father turns bitter, angry, self-pitying, and ultimately coldly brutal in the chilling conclusion. It's Bresson's most expansive film and biggest canvas, weaving the paths of numerous characters across Yvon's journey, but he edits with jackrabbit jumps, running headlong through the story with a painful feeling of inevitability. On its simplest level, Yvon's story is an elaborate chain of cause and effect, the ripples of a selfish act resulting in the fall of a proud man and the destruction of his soul, and Bresson presents every link in that chain with precise, cold clarity. There is little hope evidenced in L'Argent, but there is powerful sense of loss and sadness in this portrait of a society so obsessed with money that it loses its humanity. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Last Word from a Giant of Film
It's amazing so few people know of Bresson's films; he's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. This film, his last, is brutally efficient in laying out his often bleak view of the world. Based on a Tolstoy story 'Le Faux Billet', it's an exercise in zero sum eliminative logic. The fact that the culprit (a conterfeit bill) is set in motion by playfully malicious youths and then the path is cleared by the greed and malice of their hypocritical parents is a beautiful setup for this dark meditation on the subjugation of human beings to their ruthless god.

The abstract mechnanized backdrop for the titles sequence is a money machine. As is so often the case, behind the deadpan performances of his nonactors (many of whom are superb in this movie), Bresson fetishizes on his subject unto hypnosis; in this film, notice how many times doors, small and large, are slamming, beginning with the automated one closing the first transaction, to the last image of a row of people gawking at the door. This film retains its searing impact through many viewings.

Tolstoy meets Bresson, and loses
This was, as it turned out, Robert Bresson's final film - he died last year, having spent the better part of the century making only fourteen feature films, most of which are truly remarkable. Fairly loosely adapted from a Tolstoy story, it starts off with a middle-class kid passing a forged banknote and ends in axe-murder. Bresson displays commendable artistic nous in avoiding the preachier, more moralistic bits of the original story (it's not one of Tolstoy's better tales) and concentrates instead on the man-made but nevertheless impersonal forces that conspire to drag the oilman Yvon from decent family man to murderer. (The murder itself is one of the most stunning, and yet most discreet sequences in the history of film.)

Bresson's usual crawling pace is sped up here, as there are so many stories and sub-plots to get through. Kent Jones, in his excellent study of the film, has observed that while Bresson has a wonderfully acute sense of what young people are like, he falls down a bit when he tries to depict the Paris underworld; but it doesn't matter, as this is a film with its eyes on bigger matters than documentary realism.

Bresson was at least 80 when he made L'Argent, and his uncanny sense of rhythm and timing were not at all dulled; the fairly gentle pace of the opening scenes accelerates into hyperspace before the end. L'Argent is about as far from the conventional crime picture is you'll ever get; the opening shot, of the metal screen of an ATM machine sliding shut, establishes the sense of inexorability. There are no Good But Troubled Cops, no Criminal Masterminds. Everybody in the film is humanly inexplicable, inexplicably human. When Yvon, at the film's visceral climax, asks the question "Where's the money?", it was Bresson himself who, in an interview, gave the answer: Everywhere. If only most directors' final films were as good as this.

A very subliminal, enigmatic experience.
This was the first Bresson film I saw and was by far the best. The languid and minimilistic style conveyed by Bresson takes some time getting used to, but its understating of the central theme is a powerful psychological device. Thematically, Bresson conveys to the audience the humiliation and inexorable decline of a working class man who was unfortunate to possess fake French Franc notes as a result of a petty and irresponsible joke initiated by middle/upper class schoolboys. The most patent disturbing factor of this film is how an ordinary, everyday working man, happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; this results in the young man going to jail & losing his family (including the heart breaking death of his baby whom he never saw). The effects are cataclysmic and tragic as the final scenes ensue. This is an excellent film which will sear the mind, heart and soul and will live and haunt you for the rest of your life. A must see.