I saw this French film, Le Souffle, about a delinquent teenage boy abandoned by his father and packed off by his mother to the countryside to live and work on his uncle’s farm. The film’s ability to conjure up the hormonally-induced fever dreams of adolescence (an uneasy mix of primitive violent impulses, rural ennui and sexual desire) is quite palpable and the black and white photography was nice to look at. Anyway, don’t go searching for the film as it is only available on a Region 2 disc, but I bring it up because some reviewers compared the film to the work of Robert Bresson (I’d probably argue Jean Cocteau seeing as the film drifts into surreal, often homoerotic territory but that’s another story). I had never seen a Bresson film and while picking up a novel at the library, I came across a DVD for Bresson’s, L’argent, which was released in 1983 and was Bresson’s final effort. I decided to check it out and see what all the fuss was about. I’m glad I did as this is a terrific yet brutal condemnation of human capriciousness. If you have seen any of Michael Haneke’s films—particularly 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance or Code Unknown—it will be self-evident that Haneke studied L’argent very closely.
The central image of L’argent is an early version of an ATM machine which appears under the opening credits in a long shot and also plays a key role in two additional sequences. The depersonalization of financial transactions becomes a metaphor for the hollow emptiness of modern efficiency (for modernity itself) as well as the unspoken hypocrisy that shapes the distance (ethical, moral and metaphysical) between the haves and the have-nots. But I think I have gotten ahead of myself. The film begins with a wealthy teenager who, coerced by a friend, passes a counterfeit 500 Franc note at a local Parisian photo shop. The owner of the shop upbraids his wife for accepting the note (as well as two additional counterfeits earlier in the week) and in turn decides to pass the fake notes forward to another schlub. The owner’s shop assistant, Lucien, unknowingly does just that to a petrol delivery man, Yvon, who attempts to use the notes at a restaurant and is arrested. Yvon leads the police to the photo shop where the owners and their assistant deny Yvon had ever entered their store. Meanwhile, the owner’s wife tracks the teenage boys down to their private high school and one young boy’s mother pays off her son’s debt. Yvon, however, is sent to court where Lucien lies for his boss (and is paid handsomely for the perjury). Yvon is set free by a forgiving judge but finds himself unemployed with a wife and toddler to support. It is at this point that he turns to petty crime. Soon he is in jail. Later the shit really hits the fan as the thin veneer of civilization is peeled back to reveal the ugly barbarism bubbling underneath.
For a while the camera simply follows these characters around: Yvon and his family, the wealthy boy, the boy’s mother and father, and the shop owners and their assistant (it turns out Lucien has been stealing from his boss and will join Yvon in jail for a short period). It soon becomes clear, however, that Yvon is Bresson’s main focus. He’s a hard character to like. He is, in fact, a perfect example of Foucault’s notion of a docile body. Even when innocent, Yvon’s stoic resignation renders the character contradictory at best (the man never seems to get angry at the gods who have conspired against him). Still, Bresson, working from a novella by Tolstoy, has more in store for the viewer. For a while L’argent plays like a screed against capitalism and, I suppose, it is that. Indeed, one can look at the three families represented as standing in for upper, middle and working class Westerners (all pushing those with less than themselves down further into the muck). But when Yvon is quietly transformed (after a series of troubling plot complications) from menial worker/hapless criminal to a cool, calm and collected sociopath, it appears that Bresson is leading us down a wholly original path. Let me simply say that the film’s narrative veers into some pretty disturbing areas, and at 81 minutes L’argent is incisively compact. Bresson’s tightly controlled compositions, as well as his willingness to cut away from acts of violence leaving the viewer to wrestle with far more insidiously inhuman visions, are a marvel of cinematic economy. So what’s the point? Toward the end of the film, Yvon confesses a crime to the film’s most sympathetic character, an older woman who visibly bares the brunt of a lifetime of callous treatment. She responds with the film’s most heartbreaking line: “If I were God, I’d pardon the whole world.†What takes place in the film’s final minutes is seemingly unpardonable yet Bresson, moving away from Tolstoy, refuses to make things easy for his audience. We are left mute and wondering; quietly attempting to make sense out of the world the film presents.