Alicia I love this movie so much

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

morrison-dylan-fan After watching a great double bill,I decided to check François Truffaut's other credits. Looking at this time for 1983 titles to view for an upcoming ICM poll,I was saddened to find that '83 was the year Truffaut made his final production. Searching for other French films from the year to view,I was surprised to find that along with Truffaut, Robert Bresson had also made his final film in 1983,which led to me paying tribute to both auteurs. View on the film:Struggling to fund the movie since he began writing the adaptation in 1977, writer/directing auteur Robert Bresson proves that it was worth the effort with a highly distinctive,minimalist appearance. Updating Leo Tolstoy's short story to the present, Bresson spirals down with Yvon Targe in icy, neural mode shots of inanimate objects and stilted glances towards the corners of rooms feeling the screen with eerie, muffled sounds, and the pushing of falling objects into frame drawing a sketch of Targe's latest unfortunate incident. While following Bresson's method of the actors being models, Christian Patey brilliantly takes advantage of this in his performance of Targe, who becomes increasingly passive to every bad turn set off from the fake note,to the point where Patey ends Targe looking off with hollow eyes. Updating Leo Tolstoy's short story, the screenplay by Bresson makes each drop Targe takes into this merciless world be turned from Targe's first fold of money.

Joseph Pezzuto "You have me on your conscience. You have to answer for that now." So states our innocent main protagonist to the guy who sent him to jail. People tend to misconstrue the sage adage of money "being the root of all evil" when, in actuality, it is the love of it that is so. Managing money is one of the many important facets of what has been placed within our means and is not to be taken lightly. It is also an enormous responsibility to be taken into emphatic consideration. Does this film play out as the saying 'cold-hard cash' infers? Let's take a look.'L'Argent' is a 1983 French drama directed by veteran writer/director Robert Bresson (Pickpocket, Au Hasard Balthazar). Based on Leo Tolstoy's 1912 novella 'The Forged Coupon', it was Bresson's last film, though he passed away in 1999, but earned its creator the Director's Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. A young man enters his father's study to claim a monthly allowance, as his father obliges. But the son presses for more, citing a school debt he must pay as the father dismisses him. An appeal to his mother fails as well. Taking matters into his own hands, he pawns off his watch to a friend, of whom, rather than paying him back, provides him with a forged five-hundred franc note. The slip is then brought into a photo shop where the young man is on the pretext of purchasing a picture frame. When the store co-manager discovers the fake, he scolds his partner for her lack of wariness. She in turn rebukes him in turn for accepting two forged notes the previous week. Vowing to pass off all forged bills in their possession at the next opportunity, enter Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), a gas man of whom, in his hand, holds a bill. Upon leaving, he goes to eat at a restaurant, beginning a formidable turnaround in a deadly game that chose him as a pawn rather the other way around when he tries to pay the tab.What follows afterwards is the slow but gradual descent into the corruption tangled in a web of scandal, deceit and shattered innocence as Yvon is now a culprit of unfortunate circumstances far out of his control. Arrested, but avoiding jail time, he loses his job, leading him to be the get-away car driver for a bank robbery when desperate for money. Arrested and sentenced for three years doing time, while incarcerated his daughter dies and his wife writes she is leaving him to start a new life. Upon release, Yvon has nothing. Enraged and bent on revenge against the world, he murders hotel keepers, robbing them of their till, and hides out in a house of a kind woman and her family,and, after some time passes, one night kills everyone with an axe. Going to a restaurant, he confesses his crimes to an officer, leading, once again, to his arrest.The end of the film is what makes this movie. Poetic throughout yes, and then the rage of an empty man torn of his will to live for a dynamic ending of blood and the inner cry of needless loss of the average working-class man and his world chewed up and spat in the dirt. 'L'Argent', along with actual money, shares its value in that it can indeed convey a flavorless sojourn down a road few or less are willing nor wanting to travel from the invisible power it so emanates from its green, lifeless form and feel aimed, in this picture, at an innocent but nonetheless damned soul. The film does show, however, that money is the character study, and that crime and punishment can be as cold and clinical of what many people so badly want to obtain which in return might just be their ultimate downfall if not preceded with extreme caution. What starts with a few bourgeois teenagers involved with counterfeit bills whose parents don't give them the money they want all unfortunately backfires on a simple, unsuspecting man just of whom was just living a normal life with a family that is sadly no more, revealing now the bleak, colorless world of court rooms and prison cells therein. A powerful, harrowing and fitting swansong for the then eighty-two year-old director, 'L'Argent' meticulously but honestly reveals the value not only of its eponymous title but also that of the redemption of the human spirit in a world gone hellishly awry. As CPEA states in a review from Time Out: "this is a return to the extremes of crime and punishment that Bresson last used in Pickpocket; and as in that film, crime is a model of redemption and prison a metaphor for the soul".

tieman64 "They are not intrinsically evil, but their behaviour has evil consequences." - Bresson Economist Frederic Bastiat once wrote "the parable of the broken window", in which he examined the economic implications of a boy breaking a shopkeeper's window in a fictional town. After the window's destruction, so the parable goes, the townspeople then observe that the shopkeeper will need to pay a local glass-maker to fix his window, that the glass-maker might in turn spend these earnings at a bakery, that the baker would then spend this profit elsewhere, and so on. Therefore, the townspeople conclude, the broken window turns out to be not a loss, but rather a stimulus that starts an unending ripple effect of new economic activity. Rather than a problem, the boy's act of destruction seems to be a way to give the economy of the fictional town a boost.Bastiat's point, however, is that whilst this "stimulus" is easily observed, there is a corresponding absence of spending, along with motions elsewhere within the system which go on unseen. For example, forced to spend his savings on a replacement window, the hapless shopkeeper is now unable to pay for other things, like a new display case or shelves. The expense of buying a window is thereby a silent, unseen loss of potential business expansion. So while the glass-maker may benefit from the increased business in the short term, it has come at the expense of others. Overall, the total wealth in the economy has been decreased by the cost of a window.Indeed, if wealth could somehow be increased by breaking windows, why not break every window in sight? If a glass-maker's increased business constitutes economic gain, why not destroy the entire town so that the whole population could be put to work rebuilding everything? Despite the resulting "full employment", this scenario would represent an enormous and senseless destruction of wealth. Though of course such wanton destruction is sometimes the aim; war loves profiting off destruction, and destructive cycles are often precisely what keeps our economic systems afloat.Regardless, Bastiat's parable relates to our current economic crisis (the late 2000 financial crisis and subsequent measures, bailouts and tax breaks) in other ways. If governments can benefit economies by paying off the debts of a few, why not pay off the debts of all? Why not take on the mortgages and credit card debts of entire countries? Bastiat's answer (which even basic physics told us centuries ago): spending money creates no wealth and aggregate debt must perpetually increase. The "economic activity" we see as a result of government spending is but the transfer of wealth from here to there. Indeed, when the overhead of government bureaucracy is taken into account (and the fact that the government lends its money at zero and is then forced to buy it back at 3 or 4 percent, along with the contradictions of interest-based/issued money) it actually results in a long term loss; an entropy effect if you will. Today governments are unveiling a slew of stimulus packages which are based on the premise, or wager, that the economy can be renewed and led to wealth creation. But while such "stimulated" financial health may seem obvious or desired in the short term, it always comes at a higher cost down the road; deeper holes to fall into and future bondage.Robert Bresson's final two films, "The Devil Probably" and "Money", are implicitly about hidden costs and the invisible currents of our economy, though Bresson is more concerned with how such things intersect with issues of spirituality, personal autonomy and existentialism. In this regard, "the Devil" of "The Devil Probably" alluded to "invisible market forces" which "influence everything". Struggling to concoct a means of ethically living within such an all-pervasive system, our hero thus opts to commit suicide, Bresson finding a certain spirituality in his hero's revocation of the material. "Money", however, presents the flip-side of "Devil": the grotesque toll living within the system has on the soul, spirit and body. Note that by this point Bresson was fully atheist. His conceptions of "soul" and "spirituality" are here more akin to a code of ethics.The plot: the son of wealthy parents is in debt. He counterfeits 500 dollars - think of him as a central bank, printing money when it suits him - and knowingly passes this money onto a photography shop, who just as knowingly passes the money to Yvon, an oil delivery man. Yvon attempts to use this counterfeit money at a restaurant, but is arrested because the proprietors have no faith in him and his money. The word credit itself comes from the Latin word "credere", "to believe", the system as a whole fuelled by a kind of irrational faith.Yvon then quickly descends into life of crime, before meeting a woman who offers him redemption. He murders her for cash instead and then guiltily turns himself over to the police. Like "The Devil Probably", money, labelled the new divine by everyone in the film, is seen to have a life of its own, controlling everyone and everything in society. As it circulates, humans impassively disadvantaged fellow humans, whilst the wealthy use their power to escape both the law and such "trickle down" disadvantages. In the impersonal detachment of contemporary society, money serves as the surrogate for human emotions, which are frivolously expressed through its casual exchange. But money also exhibits a near biological behaviour: virulent and infectious, the notes contaminate everyone who comes into contact with them, sins escalating, snowballing and slowly destroying souls. Yvon himself struggles to summon the will necessary to escape money's grip and the futures it foreordains. He is forever held in its sway. The film's narrative trajectory is literally from a ATM machine's mouth to perpetual confinement. It's a reverse of "Probably's" suicide: slow, pitiful and ignoble.7.9/10 – Multiple viewings required.

timmy_501 The more Bresson films I see the more I realize that his films are not for me. As usual, the acting in L'Argent (The Money) is intentionally wooden and emotionless. The film is also characteristically (and maddeningly) brief. Rather than explain crucial points, Bresson chooses to hint at them to maintain the "mystery." All that aside, L'Argent begins promisingly enough. The greed of a pair of young counterfeiters and a store clerk leads to major problems in the lives of an innocent man. The misdeeds of these people eventually come back on them, but to nowhere near the level they come back on the guiltless protagonist. He is seemingly naïve and innocent in the beginning, but he quickly loses these characteristics as a result of his interactions with crime. Once he loses his job, he is forced to turn to a life of crime and his morality quickly deteriorates. In fact, it deteriorates ridiculously quickly. By the end of the film, he has become the most terrible criminal imaginable and lost everything of value that he ever had. The concept of small sins leading to large ones is interesting, but it is hurt by the exaggeration with which it is presented. Sad that this film (Bresson's last) was a failure for the director.