L'Argent Reviews

Writer-director Robert Bresson's 13th film in 40 years, L'ARGENT is, like so many of his other films, a work of true cinematic genius that stands head and shoulders above most other pictures and seems to defy critical judgment. L'ARGENT begins with young schoolboy Norbert's (Marc Ernest Fourneau) trying unsuccessfully to get money from his parents. An enterprising classmate gives him some counterfeit bills, which Norbert passes on to a worker in a photographic shop. The shop owner (Didier Baussy) is determined to get rid of the phony bills and palms them off to an unsuspecting deliveryman (Christian Patey), who innocently pays a cafe bill with the forged notes and is promptly arrested. The schoolboy's mother pays the shop owner to keep silent about her son's involvement. Throughout the first half-hour of the film (before we are certain that Patey is the leading player), money is the central character. It changes hands from one person to another in extreme close-ups and carries us from one scene to the next, one location to the next. The bills are recognizable, whereas the people passing them are not. The power of money and the effects of one person's impositions upon another eventually lead the feckless deliveryman along an increasingly harrowing life's path to the film's stunning conclusion. Bresson justly won acclaim for this piercing film from the Cannes Film Festival, which voted him Best Director.