258 - l'Argent (Money), 1983, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.

Friday, September 15, 2017

258 - l'Argent (Money), 1983, France.  Dir. Robert Bresson.

Once upon a time there was a counterfeit.  A counterfeit French note, that is.  A fake franc.  A fake 500 francs.

And boy, did it cause trouble.

From a boy's first effort to pass it off into circulation to the arrest of an innocent man to a botched armed bank robbery to prison to a ruined marriage to the death of a child to an attempted suicide to serial capital murder.

Maybe we should stick with real money.

Leo Tolstoy wrote a novella in 1904, which he published in 1910, entitled The Forged Coupon.

Robert Bresson, who had already adapted a few Dostoevsky stories, adapted the first half of Tolstoy's story for this film.

Bresson said that he turned to Russian authors because they were among the best at telling the truth.

All Norbert was trying to do was borrow some money to pay off a friend at school.  Neither his father nor his mother would give him the money.  Good.  Earn it.  But no.  He does not earn it.  He goes to borrow it from his friend.  His friend produces the counterfeit and insists they go try it.  Norbert gives in.

They pass it off at a frame store.

What do the owners of the store do when they detect it?  Especially when they realize it is the third one in a week?  They pass it on, of course.

To Yvon.  An innocent man who works at a gas company.  He is caught when he tries to pay his restaurant tab.  He asserts that he got it from the frame store.  The authorities take him to the frame store to check his story.  The owners of the frame store deny it.  This begins the downward spiral of Yvon's life--as expressed in bleak and fatalistic terms.

Bresson was a different kind of filmmaker.

He aspired to using cinema to explore the interiors of the soul.  And the presence of God in nature.

He gave equal emphasis to sight and sound.  While the visual showed the outer world, the aural had the capacity to show the inner world.  Thus, he put a lot of care into his foley, dialogue, and scoring work, with all sounds added in post.

Where Ingmar Bergman was the filmmaker of the face, Robert Bresson was the filmmaker of hands and feet.

And doorways and doorknobs.

He saw portals as openings into drama.  Many moments happen in a doorway.  Opening.  Closing. Encountering.  Passing through.  Symbolic and literal.

He also elided what others might identify as the big moments--such as the bank robbery or the murders--and cut from one unusual angle to another, with only sound as the signifier of the action.

His passion, however, did lead to dogmatism.

He stated emphatically at Cannes that movies should not entertain.

He wanted all cinema to be art, suggesting that art cannot be entertaining and that entertainment cannot be artistic.

The history of cinema itself contradicts that assertion.

His demands about filmmaking and money dampened his own productivity.  He had tried, for example, to make this film, l'Argent, for four years before he could procure the funds to proceed.

And he insisted on using non-actors in his roles, casting people who had never acted before and further demanding of them that they never act again.  Fortunately, some of his non-actors ignored his demands and went on to become successful actors.

The characters in Bresson movies are often stiff, absent, and unable to express authentic human emotion convincingly.  Yet because it was his aesthetic choice, it developed into an artistic style. Critics were sometimes drawn to it because it felt different and because they could project whatever emotion they wanted onto the blank canvas of the static and emotionless person standing before them.

The Criterion disc fails to provide a commentary, as many do; however, it contains an excellent video essay by Bresson expert James Quandt, as well as an uncomfortable press conference with Bresson and his players at Cannes.