It’s utterly amazing what one small gesture can do to affect another person’s life. “L’Argent” isn’t so much a crime drama, though it does involve a crime, but it’s more a tale about how every choice creates a ripple, that have an important affect. Director Robert Bresson takes the first part of Leo Tolstoy’s posthumously published 1911 novella “The Forged Coupon” and uses it for the basis of a story about the downfall of various people, all the hand of a forged piece of currency.
While collecting payment from a Paris photography shop, hard-working fuel delivery man Yvon Targe (Christian Patey) is purposefully given counterfeit money without his knowledge. When Yvon innocently uses the bills to pay for his lunch later that day at a local café, he narrowly avoids arrest but loses his job. To support his family, Yvon takes a new job with a criminal element, but his life continues nevertheless to spiral downward into the depths of violence and despair.
“L’Argent” is something of a grim and bleak tale about bad decision transforming someone’s life, and director Bresson builds on a wonderful snowball effect that is carried out until the very final scene. “L’Argent” was Bresson’s last film and won the Director’s Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, and takes a keen perspective in exploring the passing bill through various hands. There isn’t a ton of build up or suspense, as the film becomes something of a folly of human errors with the pair of affluent young boys dealing with money and personal debts. One of the friends’ make a fake franc, and goads his friend in to using it for the money, and things go as planned.
Before long the store managers are recognizing the phony bill creating a thick tension between them, and so on. It’s so rife with tension that it becomes inevitably worse when the franc is transferred to Yvon. Director and writer Robert Bresson is very good in pitting the focus on hands and building on the potential for this small scam to completely go awry. “L’Argent” is richly layered and fascinating tale about crime and bad decisions compounding to create an inescapable prison for us.
Included in the Criterion Edition is the original French trailer for L’argent. There’s the thirty minutes 1983 Cannes Press Conference for L’argent featuring Robert Bresson and his film. There are some very interesting exchanges between the legendary director and journalists and actors in which he discusses and occasionally even defends his stylistic preferences and even working methods. The press conference was filmed after a screening of L’argent at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 1983.
It is in French and English, with optional English subtitles. There’s also “L’argent,” A to Z, a brand new essay, written and narrated by James Quandt, that focuses on Robert Bresson’s unique style and the conception of L’argent It’s nearly an hour with subtitles and features twenty six chapters including “Anachronism,” “Biography,” “Color,” “Doors,” “Ellipsis,” “France,” and much more. The Criterion’s physical features includes a 40-page illustrated leaflet featuring an essay by critic Adrian Martin and a newly expanded 1983 interview with director Robert Bresson by critic Michel Cement.