Robert Bresson (1983)
A few years ago I read a collection of Tolstoy’s shorter fiction, including The Forged Coupon. I found the book unrewarding hard work and remember little about this particular story but the information in the opening titles that it inspired L’argent confirmed expectations of a Christian morality tale to follow. This is Robert Bresson after all (and in both senses of that phrase: L’argent was his final work). Bresson’s screenplay omits the second part of the source novella, in which Tolstoy describes a domino effect of redeeming deeds to complement the first part’s chain of wrongdoings that lead to murder. The result is a tough watch but never the slog that late Tolstoy tends to be. L’argent is bleakly and succinctly impressive.
Teenager Norbert receives pocket money from his wealthy father and asks for more to pay a debt to a schoolmate. The father refuses, as does Norbert’s mother. His friend gives him a forged five-hundred-franc note, which they take to a photograph shop and use to buy a photo frame. It’s the third time counterfeit money has been accepted there in the space of a few days and the narked shop owner decides to get rid of all three forgeries at the first opportunity – provided by Yvon, a young delivery driver. Yvon, who receives the notes in payment for heating oil he delivers to the shop, is the protagonist of L’argent.
He tries to pay for a meal with the money but the restaurant manager realises it’s forged and calls the police. Yvon is arrested, charged and, in the dock, hears staff of the photo shop lie to the court that they’ve never seen him before. Although he’s not sent to jail, Yvon loses his job. In desperate need of funds, he agrees to drive a getaway car for a gang of bank robbers. Police foil the robbery and Yvon is arrested again. This time, he gets a jail sentence, of three years. While in prison, he learns of the death of his only child and that his wife has decided to leave him. Yvon tries but fails to take his own life.
In the same jail is Lucien, the shop assistant who perjured himself at Yvon’s first trial. Lucien had been cheating his employers by marking up prices while they were out of the shop and pocketing the difference. He was found out and fired but had made copies of the shop keys and robbed the shop’s safe before embarking on a larger-scale criminal enterprise – a cash card-skimming operation. He’s eventually arrested and jailed. His invitation to Yvon to join him in a prison break triggers a key exchange. Yvon replies, ‘I’d kill you rather than go with you’. Absurdly proud that his crimes didn’t involve violence, Lucien reminds Yvon that ‘Neither of us are killers – we have no one on our conscience’. ‘You have me on your conscience,’ says Yvon.
After his eventual release from prison, Yvon kills and robs a couple who run a hotel. He sees an elderly woman outside a bank and follows her back home. Despite her alcoholic husband’s objections, she lets Yvon stay in their house. The woman is kindly, Christian and a drudge exploited and exhausted by her husband and other resident family members. ‘What are you waiting for, a miracle?’ Yvon asks her. He uses an axe to murder the woman’s exploiters and then kills her. In a bar, he confesses to a police officer his violent crimes, and is escorted away. Other people in the place watch him go.
According to Tom Milne, whose (July 1983) review in Monthly Film Bulletin was the handout for this BFI screening, Bresson described the film’s climax as ‘a routing of the forces of evil’. In an attempt to explain this ‘startling interpretation’, Milne goes on to note that ‘the meaning of Yvon’s final murders is inescapable: deliverance for the woman, retribution for society, expiation for his own membership of that society’. I struggle to understand Bresson’s Catholic theology in this context and Milne’s favoured preposition (‘retribution for society’?) but there’s no denying the dramatic impact of L’argent.
As usual, Bresson worked with a cast who hadn’t acted professionally before. Some are convincing and expressive – notably Christian Patey in the lead and Sylvie van den Elsen as Yvon’s benefactress and final victim – but all perform with a lack of histrionics that, although their lack of detailed characterisation limits the film at one level, has the effect of making its moral seriousness more salient. Bresson’s almost complete eschewal of music has impact, too. There is none, except for the Bach piano piece played by the alcoholic husband just before his death. One query I’ve not been able to settle through a quick online search. Norbert’s father is played by André Cler, whom I thought I spotted again, later on. Is the father, who could be considered the cause of all that happens subsequently, also the prison warden that tells Yvon, ‘A man who never killed may be more dangerous than a murderer’?
5 June 2022
