L' Argent is considered to be Bresson's last great movie. And yes, it is very much a Bresson movie: it has Bresson's economical, even serene, approach to film, acting without emotional expression and it contains themes that are familiar to people having watched his earlier movies (including letters). The story of L'Argent (based on a short story by Tolstoy) seems to have a sort of inevitability to it - it is a story about evil surfacing through a series of coincidences which have a disastrous effect. The film begins with two boys trying to buy a frame with a forged note (one of them acts from the need to pay back some money he owes to a friend), and then the note is knowingly passed on to other hands, among them a fuel trucker, who ends up in court, where he is not believed, loses his job, turns into an acomplice in a robbery, ends up in jail - where he learns that his wife leaves him. From there, things get no better. He is released from prison and then goes on what can be called a killing spree. Being asked to justify one of the murders, he calmly states: I enjoyed it.
No character in the film is seen mulling over alternative paths of action. People act with a sort of disastrous immediacy (made all the more striking in the hands of Bresson's dispassionate actors) - if you are familiar with Pickpocket, you know what this sort of destructive choreography might look like from Bresson's point of view. Bresson shows how different actions have an effect on each other, creating a situation in which goodness does not appear as a possibility - there is deceit, lies and violence. It is tempting to describe the story of L'Argent as an innocent man who, through unfortunate external circumstances and no ill will of his own, becomes another man. Somehow, this seems wrong-headed. Maybe it is the circumstances that makes me think about this (watching Bresson on Good Friday): L'Argent seems to be about original sin and evil as lack - a downward spiral changed only by a sudden change of direction, a sort of radical grace
I must admit that my feelings about this films were a bit mixed. Altough I do admire Bresson's approach to film-making, along with his harshness with regard to ideas, I did at times find myself at a loss of what to make of L'Argent, a film where Bresson very ingenuosly tells a story that only partially happens in the frames. What kind of inevitability does the film depict? Or should it be called inevitability, from what perspective? I do not crave more input about the inner workings of the main character, the fuel trucker. That would make for a completely different, and non-Bressonian, film. It's just that the chain of events move so quickly that I sometimes lose track of what is going on, and this risks making me care less - one gruesome thing happens, and then another, just as inexplicable. Watching the first part of the movie, I started to think that this would be a film about the power of money, but after a while, that stopped making sense as a more overarching theme. But heeellooo, the film is, as a matter of fact, called "Money". At leat this is another take on the destructive impact of money than I've seen before, even though it is of course possible to make connections to a film like Greed - but there seems to be a distinction in terms of fundamental ideas about what an obsession about money does, what kind of havoc it wreaks, and what kind of world it corrupts (or were we already corrupted? When is money a motivation, when is it a symbol for something else for Bresson?).
The theme may be tough to the extent that I have a hard time not attempting to domesticize or putting a false meaning into this chain of events which do not seem to reveal an inner meaning? So maybe the problem is not the film, but the problem is in me, in my limited capacity to understanding Bresson's perspective (and also this time, I have the feeling I'm getting it wrong by talking about 'capacities'!)
If I would think some more about this film, I would perhaps try to elucidate why the story seems to fall neither within the category of causes (it is what it is, it drives) or reasons (trying to make sense of why somebody did what he did) - Bresson seems to evoke an altogether different point of view, and it is this I have trouble grasping. Which leads me to an important question: what does it mean to say that one does not grasp a religious perspective? It is not as if there is something very specific my thoughts are unable to reach, as in the case where I have trouble understanding how the machine of a car works or why Molly chose to invest her money in this type of stock rather than that one. What I want to say is that I feel like I can't decide whether I should say L'Argent is a flawed film, or whether I should say it is a film which I do not understand. Or to state my worry in a blunt way: couldn't the kind of unintelligibility and distance that L'Argent presents to us (forces on us?), where we are not allowed to make judgments, or try out intepretations, evoke a hazardous perspective: YOU SIMPLY CANNOT UNDERSTAND! But that is not really what I would like to say either (as if the contrast we have is: we make judgments or things are unintelligible - hm). L'Argent made me think about some questions in the philosophy of religion I haven't been thinking about in a long time, questions that I have no clear answer to, but questions which are pressing nonetheless.
(Religious themes in films, books etc. are often treated as dangerous because they risk making a work of art didactic or that its openness is closed down. Bresson's film, and this one in particular, is a counter-example; one could talk about openness, but not in the sense that everything is possible, that the work of art exists in an autonomous sphere in which our super-free interpretations keep swirling around in a state of easy co-existence.)
This is a film I should watch again, as I realize that I missed many details when I watched it the first time.
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