L'argent is a 1983 French drama film written and directed by Robert Bresson. The film is loosely inspired by the first part of Leo Tolstoy's posthumously published 1911 novellaThe Forged Coupon. It was Bresson's last film and won the Director's Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. This film is unrelated to the silent 1928 film.
Plot
A young man, Norbert, enters his father's study to claim his monthly allowance. His father obliges, but the son presses for more, citing a debt he owes a schoolmate. The father dismisses him and an appeal to his mother fails. He tries to pawn his watch to a friend, who instead gives him a forged 500-franc note. The boys take the counterfeit to a photo shop and use it to purchase a picture frame. When the store's co-manager finds out, he scolds his partner for her gullibility. She chides him in return for having accepted two forged notes the previous week. He then vows to pass off all three forged notes at the next opportunity. He uses them to pay Yvon for delivering heating oil. Yvon tries to pay his restaurant tab with the forged notes, but the waiter recognizes them as counterfeit. Yvon is arrested and at his trial the photo shop people lie. Yvon avoids jail time, but he loses his job. One of the owners of the photo shop recognizes Norbert on the street with a group of his school friends, and she approaches the school authorities and accuses him to them. When the Chaplain quizzes some of the students about the counterfeit bills, Norbert leaves the classroom. At home, his mother advises him to deny everything, and she goes to the photo shop with a bribe for the owners to let the matter rest. Lucien, the photo shop assistant who committed perjury for his employers at the trial by refusing to recognize Yvon, is scamming them by marking up prices while they are out of the shop and pocketing the difference. He is discovered and fired, but has made copies of the shop's keys. He and two friends rob the shop's safe and begin an ATM card skimming operation. In need of money, Yvon acts for a friend as the driver of a getaway car for bank robbers. The police foil the robbery and arrest Yvon, who is tried and sentenced to prison for three years. While in prison, Yvon learns of his daughter's death and his wife's decision to start a new life without him. He fails in an attempt to commit suicide. Lucien and his accomplices are eventually caught and arrested, and Lucien is sent to the same prison as Yvon. Lucien offers to include Yvon in a prison break attempt but Yvon refuses. Yvon blames Lucien for his troubles and wants revenge. Lucien proceeds with his escape plan but Yvon and his cellmate hear commotion in the hallway that indicates that Lucien has been caught, and Yvon's cellmate speculates that Lucien will probably be transferred to a much more severe maximum-security prison. Released from prison, Yvon promptly murders and robs a pair of hotel keepers. He is taken in by a kind woman over the objection of her father. Some time passes, and one night Yvon kills them along with others in their house with an axe. He goes to a restaurant, confesses to a police officer, and is arrested.
Bresson first began work on the film's script in 1977. It is based on Leo Tolstoy's The Forged Coupon. Bresson later said that it was the film "with which I am most satisfied—or at least it is the one where I found the most surprises when it was complete—things I had not expected."
Reception
The film was released in France on 18 May 1983 through MK2 Diffusion.
Critical response
wrote in The New York Times, "that Robert Bresson is still one of the most rigorous and talented film makers of the world is evident with the appearance of his beautiful, astringent new film, L'Argent. would stand up to Marxist analysis, yet it's anything but Marxist in outlook. It's far too poetic – too interested in the mysteries of the spirit." Tom Milne found L′Argent to be "unmistakably a masterpiece", noting "the extraordinary apotheosis of the final sequence," and the "breathless wonderment in the last shot of onlookers frozen as they gaze into the empty room from which all evidence of crime has gone."
