L’ARGENT

| 1983 – 85′ – CLASSIC, DRAMA, FILMS & LITERATURE.
Written by: Robert Bresson.
Based on the Book by: Leo Tolstoy.
Directed by: Robert Bresson.
Starring: Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Sylvie Van Den Elsen, Caroline Lang, Didier Baussy, Beatrice Tabourin, Marc-Ernest Fourneau, Bruno Lapeyre.
Official Selection Cannes International Film Festival 1983 (Winner Best Director Prize).
In French with English subtitles.
A The Criterion Collection release. |

While collecting payment from a Paris photography shop, hard-working fuel delivery man Yvon Targe 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. In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L’argent follows a counterfeit bill as it originates as a prop in a schoolboy prank, then circulates like a virus among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver and leading him to incarceration and violence. With brutal economy, Bresson constructs his unforgiving vision of original sin out of starkly perceived details, rooting his characters in a dehumanizing material world that withholds any hope of transcendence.

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