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L'Argent
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1. Show Me the Money (1999) Just over an hour into L'Argent, a sudden burst of bright whiteness – Yvon's (Christian Patey) view of toys in a shop window – introduces a strange turn in the narrative and its mood. A grey haired woman (Sylvie Van den Elsen) who is much older than Yvon walks by, and an almost imperceptible glance passes between them. A few moments later everything, for the first time in the film, is green and natural: the woman steps over a little footbridge in a field on her way home, and the tiny, babbling brook below her fills the soundtrack with a nearly supernatural omnipresence. In the distance of the deep focus frame, Yvon trails behind. The woman unlocks her door, looks off (presumably at Yvon), goes inside. Cut to Yvon, pausing at the bridge, and turning back. Then an ellipse to the woman later that evening, her dog growling with menace as she prepares a meal. Yvon simply lets himself in through the kitchen door and, at the woman's invitation, sits down. "I'm hungry", he announces, "but I can do without supper". Mystery is a watchword in the cinema of Robert Bresson, but this relationship between Yvon and his benefactor is the most mysterious he has ever portrayed. Little is spoken between these characters, and not much more is shown about the nature and extent of their mutual understandings. From that first sidewalk glance, the woman seems to realise that she has a murderer on her hands. Her submission to him is all at once masochistic, spiritual and sexual in its impulse – not to mention, eventually, suicidal. Is this old woman a Viridiana-figure doomed by her own foolish code of misplaced goodness, or a saint who brings momentary grace to a damned soul with her all-inclusive creed: "If I were God, I'd forgive the whole world"? As for Yvon, what is he by this stage of his pitiful, harrowing journey – an alienated madman, a cold manipulator, or a sad victim in desperate search of his own lost innocence? Philippe Arnaud describes Yvon as an exemplary 'refractory' hero of modern French cinema – contradictory, cryptic, unreadable, with a personality as fragmented as the film form that gives him a shadowy, fugitive presence. (1) Nothing in the first hour of the film has really prepared us for any of these arresting complications. Bresson's fans and acolytes (from Paul Schrader to Benoît Jacquot) are used to reading the blank mode of acting in his films, the understated melodrama of the narratives and the economic restraint of the style as transcendental keys to an exactly opposite realm: a world of passion, spirituality and meaning. But L'Argent comes very close to a purely literal marriage between form and content. This world is meant to be cold and bleak, barren and bare, and most of its inhabitants are indeed unfeeling, amoral automatons. The first hour has a colour scheme to match the prevailing gloom: virtually everything, from suits to walls, is a dirty shade of either grey, brown or green, and there is little to spot or relieve the impressionist murk. Even though the field through which the old woman walks is a modest patch of nature, it is a veritable, verdant paradise in comparison to the forbidding cityscape that has preceded it. The unlovely architecture of shops, courtrooms and prisons is matched by an equally harsh sound collage of alarm sirens, passing cars, whirring and clanking machinery (beginning with the auto-bank under the credits). It is a fiercely middle class world of bureaucratic institutions and service industries – the first rest stop for Yvon after his prison release is an ominous "Hôtel Moderne". The silent, dispirited bodies of the characters – especially Yvon and his wife Elise (Caroline Lang) – are frequently glimpsed pinned within the lines and bars of doorways and windows. The regal procession of disembodied gestures abstracted in what Gilles Deleuze once described as 'any space whatever' no longer carries the suspenseful or erotic energy it did in Pickpocket (1959) or A Man Escaped (1956); now every movement seems tired, listless, locked in upon itself, merely functional. L'Argent is a profoundly disconnected film, never more so than in its penultimate sequence of shots where a dog ineffectually trails around the dark rooms of the old woman's house, discovering the traces of Yvon's cold slaughter of most of the occupants. Because of this pervasive disconnection, and the chill that accompanies it, it is easy to regard the film as Bresson's most secular and materialist work – a logical culmination of the despair about modern, industrialised life that some see enacted or symbolically reflected in Lancelot du Lac and The Devil, Probably. In its first, forbidding hour, L'Argent resembles – as no other Bresson film so closely does – a Fritz Lang-style mechanism or trap. There is a steely logic to its closed circuit, as the 500 franc note forged by a trio of schoolboys triggers inexorably, step by step, the complete dissolution of Yvon's life, his gradual loss of job, family, liberty and soul. The film's title pinpoints its central 'agent': it is indeed money which animates and corrupts everything in this world – at one point resembling the excremental 'filthy lucre' which Norman O. Brown immortalised in his classic text Life Against Death (1959), as it spits out of another ugly auto-bank. Everyone in the film is inevitably caught up in the trap which the omnipotent money-mechanism sets for them. (The sombre philosopher who shares a cell with Yvon paces, clutching a Marxist tome from the 60s, and laments: "ô argent, Dieu visible, qu'est-ce que tu nous ferais pas faire" – "O money, visible god, what wouldn't you make us do?") Like an exemplary modernist Everyman, Yvon takes the worst of fate's malign blows. The film is full of implacable linking gestures that ensure the efficiency of this poor patsy's demise – such as the letters from Elise to Yvon in jail, which the camera follows as they are cruelly, publicly passed from hand to hand. In one of the film's most striking (and most Langian) conjunctions, a single shot shows first the arrival of the van bringing the master young forger Lucien (Vincent Risterucci), and then the ambulance returning Yvon to captivity after his unsuccessful suicide attempt. Although the Dostoevskyean elements of crime, violence and punishment – not to mention the face-off of a man and woman across a prison grill – seem to logically pair L'Argent with Pickpocket, the film in the Bresson oeuvre it most resembles is Au hasard Balthazar. In both movies, sleek, robotic, glamorous teens – this time gliding around serenely on mopeds – are like angels of death. More profoundly and pervasively, both films interweave a serendipitous plot from different characters and their distinct trajectories. With each surprising relocation of its narrative thread, L'Argent threatens momentarily to become the story of Lucien (with his Camus-like code of the acte gratuit, and his swift off-screen demise while daring to escape from jail), or the couple in the photo shop (clumsily scamming as best they can to survive), just as Balthazar artfully wavers between centring on the donkey, the girl, or the Satanic boy with leather jacket and transistor radio. Although much of the narrative movement in L'Argent is subject to the same, grey laws of determinism which govern its overall mood, there are intriguing, surplus details that Bresson deliberately lets slip from the materialistic mechanism. The camera lingers on a man strolling along, reading a newspaper – his lazy action almost incidentally bringing us to the police who lay in wait for bank robbers. A wide shot invites us to speculate on the quotidian lives and stories that pass through a Metro tunnel before and after the flight of the trio of lycéens with their grand stash. A touching sidebar in the final act gives us a glimpse into the broken biography of a hardened, old man (Michel Briguet), the grey-haired woman's father, as he helplessly spills his glass of wine and remembers better days as a piano teacher. Of course, an hour in, it is that patch of another green world ushered in by the old woman which gives us the greatest hope for release. This section of L'Argent builds to one of the simplest, yet most poignant passages in any Bresson film – three jump-cut shots of Yvon's hand collecting hazelnuts from tree leaves, and then the sight of him sharing his bounty with the old woman, as white sheets gently blow in the breeze. But this all turns out, somewhat cruelly, to be a temporary reprise from the doom of the modern world: far from being freed from his burden of alienation, Yvon has simply been biding his time and collecting the means to begin his final, bloody campaign of theft and murder – wielding an axe above his benefactor as he asks the spine-tingling question, "Where's the money?" A friend once expressed his eager anticipation, before seeing L'Argent, that it would be the "ultimate arthouse slasher film". And there is something just in this description because, in its fragmentation and mystery, L'Argent does indeed strike one as a violent work, certainly Bresson's most violent alongside Lancelot. As a film about the making of a murderer by a capitalist society, L'Argent has an undeniable kinship with movies such as John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990). Inadvertently inaugurating a popular genre, Bresson's own portrait of a sociopath lays out the founding, primal ambiguities of such a tale – as when it momentarily flirts with conventional psychology by having the old woman ask Yvon, "Why did you kill them? There's always a motive for murder", merely to prompt the matter-of-fact, In Cold Blood-type response, "It gave me a thrill". Bresson disposed of the second half of his source material, Tolstoy's novella "The Forged Coupon", in which (according to Richard Linklater) the maligned hero, "after participating in this circle of evil, eventually puts forth a contagion of goodness and redemption". (2) And he offers us a cryptic epilogue in which Yvon gives himself up to the cops at the local tavern – his passionless exit drawing stares from a blackened crowd. Like Jean-Luc Godard in Soigne ta droite (1987), Bresson cuts directly from the severe chiaroscuro of this final image to a dark screen, no final credits. The effect is bleak, even apocalyptic; no obvious redemption is anywhere in sight. Yet, if this ending can cause us to weep, that is because Bresson has allowed us to fully enter the same crucible of confusion which Jon Jost (another off-beat, avant garde chronicler of male killers and monsters) crystallised in a poignant, crucial image of The Bed You Sleep In (1993): the hands of a man who may or may not be a monster cupping water in a stream, and bringing it up to splash his face. We intuit, in this modest cleansing of a self as in the sharing of a few hazelnuts, the profound mystery of beings who move through landscapes of dehumanising violence with their capacities for evil and goodness alike locked, invisible and unknowable, inside them – and we witness fleeting moments of absolute, natural purity in a world all gone to hell. NOTES 2. Richard Linklater, "L'Argent", in Projections 4 1/2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 244. back * * * 2. The Weight of the World (2017) Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was not a misunderstood, constantly frustrated artist like Orson Welles; not an exiled, persecuted and imprisoned one like Sergei Parajanov; he didn’t die tragically young like Jean Vigo. For the most part, Bresson managed to make exactly the film he wanted, in his own good time. He survived almost 100 years and, by any decent standard of cultural consensus, achieved within his life span the recognised status of being among the premier artists of the 20th century. The French filmmaker Olivier Assayas once declared, with forgivable extravagance: “I still consider Bresson the greatest filmmaker ever; I have complete admiration for every single frame of his films, every single moment.” So, what was Bresson’s secret? He was, in the truest and richest sense of the word, a minimalist. In major works including Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Pickpocket, Au hasard Balthazar, Mouchette (1967) and Lancelot du Lac (1974), he pared down every scene and shot, every movement and utterance of his performers, to the bare essential. Each situation, image and sound had to have a sharpness, a freshness, a novelty. That is why Bresson’s cinema is forever modern, forever new, no matter when, where or how we each come to encounter it – and why Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice asserted that it is, for all time, the perfect cinema to inspire young filmmakers and cinephiles, “a poem that traces in the air the dream of a dawn that has no end.” Bresson told his stories in astoundingly matter-of-fact ellipses; only the most significant moments of information and sensation counted for him. He fragmented the spatial relations of each location and incident, making the world both a fiercely angular labyrinth, and an abiding, disorienting mystery. He de-dramatised melodramatic action, particularly through the use of non-actors, “models” as he called them, who blankly recited their lines. Indeed, Bresson’s conception of the relation between character, actor, self and performance became, in time, the essential attitude of postmodern cinema in the era of Hal Hartley and many others. As Bresson wrote in his book of epigrams, aphorisms and reflections, Notes on the Cinematograph: “The actor learning his part presupposes a ‘self’ known in advance – which does not exist.” Bresson’s films cast a spell upon their viewers. They demand and induce a kind of hyper-attentiveness; spectators tend to remember very precise, concrete details from them, like the sound of a babbling brook or the sight of a closing door. The pace and focus are mesmerising. The faces he shows are so full of tormented desire and soulful yearning; and their ever-moving hands trace (as filmmaker Philippe Garrel once said) the “manual work of the unconscious.” Bresson confounds those who like to reject a certain, self-conscious, mannered type of cinema as merely formalist, and hence devoid of emotional involvement – a formalist he surely was, down to the tips of his toes, but the various, self-imposed rules and strictures governing how he filmed scenes only enhanced, rather than detracted from, the substance of his narratives. “What I seek is not so much expression by gesture, word or mime”, he once proclaimed, “as expression by the rhythm and combination of images, by their position, relationship and number.” And, on another occasion: “Build your film on white, on silence, and on stillness.” Most of Bresson’s films tell the same, basic story: the passage of a character from confinement to freedom. There are many levels to this apparently simple pattern. For decades, Bresson’s best commentators, such as André Bazin, explored the religious, spiritual and existential aspects of the Bressonian allegory: humans are born in sin, fallen from grace, and they travel with difficulty, tempted at every turn, towards some kind of absolution or transcendence. But in his three final films, Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, another, darker mood predominates: a bleak vision of society as a hellish prison, without any discernible avenue of escape, let alone a shot at redemption. L’Argent shares with two earlier Bresson films, A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, a faint, ostensible relation to the conventions of the action-thriller genre. Alongside the excruciatingly elongated tension of a jailbreak in the former and the daredevil thievery in the latter, L’Argent boasts a spray of criminal acts – most strikingly, the hyper-minimalist, elliptical presentation of a bungled bank robbery, as performed by Yvon (Christian Patey) and his partners. Yet the tone of this film, its arrangement of content and form, is unique – even for Bresson. On the one hand, all sense of spectacular excitement is leached out: L’Argent has a steady rhythm and a largely monochrome mood, no matter what happens in it. On the other hand, an awful lot does happen within its brisk 83 minutes. In contradistinction to Bresson’s previous work, The Devil, Probably, which largely evacuated plot in order to offer a rambling inventory of modernity’s ills, here the narrative (distilled and adapted from Tolstoy) hardly stops for breath as it piles incident upon incident. The automatic money dispenser shown in the first shot under the credits gives the cue: there is something deliberately machine-like and glacial about the film, like a relentless, inexorable contraption of doom. (Of all Bresson’s films, it is evidently the one that has most influenced Michael Haneke.) L’Argent has an unusual structure, breaking into two unequal parts. Its first hour tracks no less than four simultaneous narrative lines (but less, in fact, than the number Tolstoy juggled in scarcely 50 pages!). These lines are linked through a succession of crossovers, each of which leads to further consequences and complications. It all starts with young Norbert (Marc Ernest Fourneau) and his pal Martial (Bruno Lapeyre), with their fiendish idea to make and use false money. We will later see a little of these two at school in relation to parents and other authority figures, but they disappear from the film’s fabric relatively quickly. A greater amount of screen time is devoted to Lucien, an employee at the photography shop that receives – and then passes on, by order of the owners – the fake note. Lucien’s subsequent, bumpy trajectory is the film’s most elliptically presented thread: he journeys from seemingly servile acquiescence to a kind of saintly rebellion (his exact politique is hard to make out), but his spell in jail is where his lifeline appears to be abruptly and enigmatically terminated, off-screen. Jail is also where Lucien and Yvon – victim of the hastily transferred note, and the lies used to cover this action – briefly intersect. Yvon’s story is sad all the way down, and is the spine of L’Argent: in succession he will lose his job, his freedom, his wife and child (the latter will even die while he is incarcerated). And it is Yvon who, eventually, will take us to the second, major part of the story, comprising its final 23 minutes. Now the film’s attention contracts, as Bresson focuses on Yvon’s interaction with a character identified only as the “grey haired woman” and other people in her household. Yvon and this woman share, instantly, what is undoubtedly the most perverse bond in any Bresson film: she declares her commitment to a code of infinite forgiveness, no matter what horrendous crimes against human nature he has committed – and, in that vow, she may indeed be inviting him to kill her, thus putting a swift end to her daily grind and misery. It will all end badly and bloodily, but not before some poignant moments of simple grace, such as when Yvon helps his new companion at an outdoor clothesline, or when he picks hazelnuts from tree branches – this action filmed, of course, in shots of hands at work. L’Argent is an imposing, even forbidding work; in one of its earliest reviews, Mike Sarne of the British magazine Films categorically stated (and not without admiration): “Bresson is not trying to please … the film is not designed to be liked.” It has a stark, even violent quality – not the violence of represented acts (these are, on the contrary, always very tactfully, almost shyly depicted), but of razor-sharp cuts and scene transitions. To a 21st century spectator, there are passages (especially during its first hour) when the repeated, documentary-like images of hands prying into cash registers or auto-tellers can almost resemble a hidden camera, reality TV “exposé” like the Food Network’s Mystery Diners: social reality seems entirely comprised of, on the one hand, the spaces in which money and other items deemed desirable (or dangerous) are locked up and, on the other hand, all the clever ways that cagey citizens will devise to break into or out of these spaces. This comparison is not entirely facetious. As in The Devil, Probably, Bresson is concerned here to offer a sketch or outline of the contemporary, Western world. Individuals choose to perform certain deeds – like counterfeiting a note, or what philosophers call the acte gratuit of senseless murder – but it is not, ultimately, free will that is running the show. There seems to be a higher power overseeing the shape of events, and it is neither God (as in several of Bresson’s earlier, more reverent films) nor even the director himself – L’Argent deftly sidesteps the Fritz Lang-style aura of an omnipotent puppet-master behind the scenes, pulling the strings of his creatures. Rather, the ominous “agent” at work here is money: the workings of an entire, capitalist boiled down to the movement of a forged note and the unstoppable catastrophe that it triggers. As money travels, it dehumanises everyone it touches, no matter their class status, religious or ideological belief. What, in other hands, could be played as the premise for a screwball comedy (the phony dollar bill that caused such riotous havoc in a small-town community!) is treated by Bresson as the darkest tragedy. The critic Philippe Arnaud (1951-1996), one of the most reliable specialists on Bresson, once described Yvon in L’Argent as a refractory character (a concept I explore in my book Mysteries of Cinema), indeed the most refractory that the director ever portrayed – meaning that he is utterly opaque, impenetrable, unreadable. Bresson regularly underplays emotional expression, but with Patey as Yvon he has reached the point of extinguishing it entirely – his flat delivery, in the photography shop, of “They’re crazy!” as he is about to be hauled off to jail is an almost comical moment of the characteristically Bressonian disjunction between what was on the script page and what registers on the screen itself. (Luc Moullet has insisted on this strange, clunky aspect of Bresson’s direction of actors – and one of his national compatriots once tartly remarked to me: “You’re lucky you can’t really hear how Bresson’s actors murder the French language”!) More crucially, now gone in L’Argent is the psychological interiority that marked Bresson heroes like the country priest (Claude Laydu), or Fontaine (François Leterrier) chipping away alone in his cell in A Man Escaped. This is not simply a matter of Bresson progressively abandoning, across his career, the device of a thought-track in voice-over narration. Something colder and more despairing has occurred: it is not the case that Bresson denies us access to the inside of his characters, but rather that there is no deep mind, heart or soul to access any longer. There is only a sometimes unpredictable mix of animal impulses and reactive behaviours, aggressive outbursts and defensive mechanisms. Yvon, in a sense, “follows the money” all the way to the end, enslaved to its avaricious logic. Yet his ultimate question to his kindly benefactor – “Where’s the money?” – is (as Arnaud points out) almost the rhetorical riddle of a sphinx: it requires no real, practical answer. Yvon goes through the motions of theft and killing, but they are meaningless even to him at this point; there is no desired outcome or goal involved. Survival, revenge, hopeful redemption: these motives meant a lot to Tolstoy in his time, but they don’t count for much anymore in the completely dehumanised, alienated, anonymous world that Bresson captures here. Many have remarked on what an unusual and disconcerting testament film L’Argent is for Bresson to have made in his 80s – he didn’t intend it to be his last (he kept pursuing a longstanding Genesis project, featuring mainly animals in the cast, until it definitively evaporated), but its apocalyptic gong sounded as the fitting, if despairing, close to a career. The great Josef von Sternberg once defined the “lasting vibration” or Nachklang that every assiduous film director seeks to achieve as an “after-timbre” or “ghost-resonance” that persists once his or her film has vanished from the screen. In the case of L’Argent, I can testify to the power of this resonance: as an eager young cinephile, I couldn’t sleep for two days after the double-bill whammy of it and The Devil, Probably at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1983. The world is certainly hard in Bresson’s films, but it is also luminous – hopeless and hopeful, miserable and magical at the same time. Critics argue these days about whether Bresson was really a devout believer or a closet atheist; whether he embraced despair or attained a new level of serenity in his last films; whether he was gobsmacked by the growing presence of malign evil in the world, or instead tried to understand this sickness in manageable, human, one-to-one terms. I don’t think we need to adjudicate these arguments once and for all. The brilliance, the beauty, and the mystery of Bresson’s films lies in the rich confusion churning away at the heart of his best films, with their unforgettable moments. Moments like these: the young Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) rolling herself down a little hill several times over until she finally manages to drown herself; the strange ecstasy of the fallen teenager (Anne Wiazemsky) who covers her donkey Balthazar in a wreath of flowers, as in a marriage ceremony; the woman (Isabelle Weingarten) who suddenly moves to her returned lover off-screen, leaving behind her sad new friend (Guillaume des Forêts) at the end of Four Nights of A Dreamer (1971). And those gorgeous, green, plaintively simple images of a man and woman picking hazelnuts from a tree in L’Argent. Bresson preached no message in such scenes; rather, he aimed to make us gently captive to the eternal paradoxes, social forces, and human impulses that, for him as for us, comprise the weight of the world. MORE Bresson: The Trial of Joan of Arc © Adrian Martin June 1999 / February 2000 / March 2017 |
