L’Argent

Released in 1983, „L’Argent“ proved to be the last film directed by Robert Bresson, the French filmmaker whose many important works, shaped by his Christian faith, include „Diary of a Country Priest“ (1951) and „Pickpocket“ (1959). Bresson, who died in 1999 at 98, was known for his stark, minimalist portrayals of flawed individuals redeemed by grace in an often brutally materialist world. But for some critics, his late films are evidence of a wavering belief in a benign providence. And at first, „L’Argent“ („Money“) seems to support that thesis: the story of an innocent Parisian working man, Yvan (Christian Patey), caught up in a chain of events that makes a multiple murderer of him, it is hardly the stuff of a Sunday school lesson.

The film is indeed designed to communicate a sense of crushing fatality. Bresson’s actors (he preferred to call them „models“) are deliberately distant and inexpressive, and Yvan never even seems surprised by the relentless succession of disasters, instigated by the exchange of counterfeit 500-franc notes, that befalls him. Bresson’s unique style is based on showing both less than other filmmakers would (he elides most of the major plot points, including a bank robbery and the death of a child) and much more. He routinely leaves several frames without action at the beginning and end of his shots, creating a physical sense of stillness and eternity that swallows up the petty problems of his characters.

The final sequence of „L’Argent,“ which finds the hero killing the one character, a saintly older woman (Sylvie van den Elsen), who has been kind to him, is a dense arrangement of ambiguous images that leaves us wondering whether Yvan is God’s instrument or God’s scapegoat. Like most great poets, Bresson refuses clarity; it is the complexity and ambivalence of his work that give it lasting fascination. This fine disc from New Yorker Video is based on a recent restoration by France’s MK2 Films and includes interviews with Bresson and commentary by the critic Kent Jones. $29.95. Not rated

O, Argent, Visible God!