Posted: 07/30/2001

L’Argent

(1983)

by Parama Chaudhury

Robert Bresson’s homage to his culture’s New Wave phenomenon, with story by Tolstoy?

A couple of teenagers pass off a counterfeit note at a photographer’s shop, and the photographer, without batting an eyelid, passes it off on an unsuspecting young laborer whose life unravels at an alarming speed. Sounds like the start of a 1950s French film noir, doesn’t it? Except that there are two glitches: Tolstoy wrote the story, and Robert Bresson directed the movie. You know that a story by Tolstoy is going to have moral underpinnings, or at least, the focus will be on the emotional turmoil within the perpetrator’s mind. So there goes your chance of a Rififi evening. More importantly, even though Bresson is French and he lived through the New Wave, his style has little relation to his times or his nationality.

Bresson started life as a painter, and his movies show it. They are very visual. Dialogue is minimized (it takes up only about ten minutes of the ninety minute L’Argent). And this sure as hell is not Rembrandt! There is little sense of storytelling or elaboration. Scene after scene appears, only to jerk away and yield to the next scene. You start to wonder whether this is actually one of those picture books you have to flip through to get the illusion of movement. Come to think of it, Jackson Pollock is probably the closest artistic counterpart to Bresson’s cinematic style.

Early in his life as a director - in fact, after making only two films - Bresson decided to stop using professional actors in his films. Instead, he used “models,” who deliver their lines in a tutored monotone and move mechanically across the screen. It is hard to empathize with these characters since they seem so lifeless. There is evidently a monstrous rage building up inside Yvon, the innocent laborer who gets caught with the counterfeit note. But it is hard to empathize with him, or even to perceive him as a three-dimensional character. This makes the violence that follows seem even more horrific. None of the violence is shown, you only see the results in a very matter of fact way. The only sound during the last massacre is the dog’s agitated whimpering, which is deafening against the silence of the rest of the movie.

Bresson’s obsession with minimalism on the one hand, and morality on the other, makes him a potentially interesting filmmaker. But the fact that his style is so orthogonal to anything you might have seen before makes it hard to appreciate him. I have to admit that while I watched this movie, a devilish little voice in my head was saying “Remember the Monty Python skit spoofing French movies? The one about Brian and Briannette meeting on a garbage dump?” Seeing several of his movies together - say, Journal d’un curé de campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest, 1950) , Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962), and Pickpocket (1959), along with L’Argent - may help make some sense of them. Bresson is one of the most singular French directors of this century, and giving him a shot is definitely worth its while. If nothing else, he offers an innovative if baffling example of what to do when the rest of the country is riding the New Wave.

L’Argent was one of a series of French films, a series called “Catching Up With Your French,” shown at Cinema Classics in New York City’s East Village.

Cinema Classics is a repertory screening room dedicated to bringing classics to New York’s film community at a low price and in a cozy environment. People can watch great films at almost half the price of the local googleplex, $5.50, while drinking beer or wine. The screening room is not at all your typical mall-type theatre: it features brick walls, Gothic lighting, authentic 1930’s theatre seats, and is air-conditioned and handicapped accessible. Films are scheduled in series by theme, director or actor. Some past series include “Paranoia,” “Pre Dot Com New York,” and our ambitious two-month Noir series called “Visions of Dark.” In August we’re showing three films of the maverick director Yvonne Rainer Privilege, Murder and Murder and the Man Who Envied Women. The director will be appearing in person at Cinema Classics on August 9 at 8:30 PM to talk to the audience.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer, based in New York City.

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