L'Argent

1983 Directed by Robert Bresson

A forged 500-franc note is passed from person to person and shop to shop, until it falls into the hands of a genuine innocent who doesn't see it for what it is - which will have devastating consequences on his life, causing him to turn to crime and murder.

Christian Patey Vincent Risterucci Sylvie Van den Elsen Michel Briguet Caroline Lang Marc Ernest Fourneau

Alternative Titles

金钱, Money, Robert Bresson s money

drama crime thriller

85 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Roberto_ ★★★★ 2

actor: bonjour, i'm here to audition for the next bresson film
casting director: all right, show us what you got
actor: (•_•)
casting director: you're hired
Review by 🔮 dana danger 🔮 ★★★★ 1

of course it's some dipshit little rich kids that started this all
Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★ 4

Bresson films are very technically impressive. There is a unique style that is immaculately deployed, but they are machines. Often, for me, his filmmaking is at odds with his content and never have I found that more true than with L’Argent.
The premise could make for a beautiful neo-realist style film about how the ruling and upper classes, or just the financially stable, will always take advantage of those that they see as underneath them. This is a spiralling web of consequences and we see who always pays.
L’Argent is. It this style of film, and though it gestures towards these ideas it doesn’t breath life into any of them. This film needs to be humanist. It is about people…
Review by Wes ★★★★½ 1

"I'll become good once I'm rich."
ive arrived at the next stop in cinematic education by dipping my toes in the films of robert bresson, someone whos helped shaped not only my favorite filmmakers careers, but the language of cinema as a whole. i was a little apprehensive starting his filmography with his last film, but something about L'argent called to me. i was struck immediately by the matter-of-fact presentation; much of the cinematography is static yet mesmerizingly beautiful, there's not a soundtrack to back it up, and the performances are detached yet disturbing. given to a lesser filmmaker, i cant imagine this being pulled off with such an attention to every detail and angle. L'Argent coldness and acidity is…
Review by matthewcutchen ★★★★★

Been trying to make a Top 10 for a long time now, but I just can’t seem to narrow it down. By the time I get to the end, there are a handful (probably closer to 20) that could be in the last 3 spots. But then I realized that the there are 7 that basically always make it onto the list.
This is one of them.
I can’t even begin to put into words how perfect this masterpiece by Bresson is to me. It’s one of those films like Ida that I’ve watched obsessively (most of that was before I got Letterboxd) and only gets more and more rewarding with each re-watch. I still get that same feeling of…
Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★ 2

Matthew Ekstrom's #4 Film Selection for Edgar
Based on a short story by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy entitled "Faux Billet", L'Argent is Bresson's last uncompromising film which earned him the Best Director's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, tied with Andrei Tarkovsky for Nostalgia (1983).
This time, Bresson's trademark minimalism becomes a neutral style that is more concerned with the moral implications of tragic misunderstandings and their irreversible repercussions rather than the grisly execution of the crimes. The level of score-less realism is somehow prophesying the future disturbingly quiet and engrossing lens of Austrian director Michael Haneke, moving from event to event with absolute confidence, like if the film had some remarkable level of self-awareness in the delivery of its…
Review by Kurdt ★½ 12

Goddammit Bresson! You just got back in my good books with A Man Escaped, so I decided to trust you. “Maybe I was wrong” I thought to myself. “Maybe Mouchette was watched in the wrong mood, and it’s worth giving The Devil, Probably another chance due to that sweet title.” So I go ahead with this, all high on Bresson, having finally won me over.
So much for that.
I get it - money is evil! Look what it makes people do! Capitalism has consumed us etc. But this film is exactly why Bresson often rubs me the wrong way. The way he directs his ‘actors’ completely drains the life out of them, until they’re zombies. I understand that’s what…
Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

Money, at once worthless and, as one person calls it, "God incarnate." Bresson's final film places the titular object front and center, bypassing easy politics to demonstrate man's spiritual downfall. Never has the Bressonian use of actors as models been more unsettling, nor ever have the director's images been so searingly horrific. Lacks even the hard-won, half-ironic releases of his other films.
Review by Sadie Sanchez ★★★★★

a few stray thoughts:
- the exchange of money between hands has never been more transcendent, more tangible
- doors are perhaps cinema's greatest image
- quite possibly the best final shot of a final film by any filmmaker ever
- no director has any right to be this good
Review by russman ★★★

This is why you should always ask for a receipt
Review by ashley ★★★½ 2

something about a crisp 35mm film...hits!
especially after watching the visual atrocity that was mank <3

very engaging (and dismal) lil’ picture, also the first film i’ve seen (I think) where violence is heavily implied but not actually shown.
Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

Broadly derived from the first part of Leo Tolstoy's short story The Forged Coupon, L'Argent is a movie that has periods of immense beauty. It’s written and directed by Robert Bresson and was the winner of the directors' prize at the 36th Cannes Film Festival. It also brandishes his particularly distinctive manifestations, and as usual, the outcomes are always admirable. It's perhaps his most materialistic movie and is inhabited with characters shifting around and communicating in a virtually robotic manner within a world that's barren and bare. L'Argent was the final composition by the extraordinary French director, and it's a fantastic final note.

Recent reviews

Review by Olivia Weckerle ★★★

The whole cast of this film had no right being that sexy
Money money money
Review by emma ★★★★

cause we are living in Bresson's material world and i am a material girl
Review by claire torak ★★★

there were definitely things i can appreciate about l’argent (especially in terms of the cinematography and sound) but overall found its voice droned on too much for it to fully be realized (or even remarkable for that matter)
Review by Kamryn ★★★½

I can't tell you the last time I watched a film in the french language with a score so that's cool...
for a film that's 85 minutes this sure did feel like it was 120. other than that it was fine, not remarkable or memorable, but fine.
Review by Mollie Schilling ★★★½

Emotionally distant and detached, but anything but boring.
Review by Pate Duncan ★★★★½ 2

Absolutely stunning. Reminiscent of Haneke’s most subdued films like The Seventh Continent in just how much it does with its minimalism.
Its mostly static camera stages the film as a set of tableaux vivant: the frame is set and the range of narration becomes increasingly restricted. Often we see figures framed without their heads or faces present, the Antonioni-style denial of character interiority prompting projection from the viewer, or if not projection, at least a keen eye. I don’t really see why some people found this boring because it demands engagement from the spectator in such a specific way, from moving points of narrative emphasis off-screen and cuing them with sound to playing with deep and shallow focus or shot…
Review by Ben N ★★★ 2

A piece of surgically precise construction in service of nothing, its put-on of alienation, easy connection to the evils of capital-C capitalism, and French point of origin making its audience scramble for a read to validate its profundity.
All people are corrupted, all good deeds are punished sevenfold, and there is no hope. Even Robin Hood is a craven liar. The original secular fall and spiritual redemption of Tolstoy's novella — that in the same cycle that one bad deed can trigger a chain reaction of suffering, the inverse holds true for good deeds — is abandoned by Bresson, and as a result the film suffers. Its final act is one last piece of shock value to deny the work…
Review by Cody Workman ★★★½

Interesting piece that doesn’t quite come together as neatly as Bresson’s earlier works but is still an interesting exercise in slow cinema. Those compositions😩 also why is this in color🥴 Got some more thoughts but you’ll have to come to the Film Club meeting tonight to hear about them!!!
Review by Collin Roberts ★★★½ 1

This guys life was so unfortunate he went insane but it could have been worse he could have been living in England
Review by Joseph ★★★ 3

People who pronounce “Bresson” like “croissant.” I am “people.”
Wonderfully photographed (Bresson close-ups are an admittedly powerful visual tool), has a degree of conceptual strength, but I do not jibe with the overall piece or its function. A lack of affect is, of course, still affect, and one as simultaneously humorless and self-serious as the kind that Bresson traffics in here deserves some sort of critique. It is a curious exercise in emotive subtraction, but an overly academic one that floats beyond the realm of so-called “Brechtian alienation techniques.” Think of similar displays of coolness in the cinema: Tarkovsky is saved by spiritualism, Melville by genre schema, and Refn by candy-colored aesthetics. Bresson simply tells a shocking story in unshocking terms. To some this is enough, but I like my cinema like I like my orange juice . . . with a little pulp.
Review by Syd Cohen ★★½

Yoooo where’s the music 😂😂😂
I actually found the lack of score to be refreshing, and the shots were really beautiful, but that didnt make up for the fact that the film was just very dry and boring. Considering how short the runtime was, it slogged on for quite a while.
Review by Miles Calderon ★★★★½ 1

This is theater of the absurd. This is the myth of sisyphus.
The whole movie is an existentialist thought experiment forcing you to look at money until it becomes absurd. The film structurally reminds me of La Ronde or dominos. There’s a visual motif of locks and doors that I think has to do with the constraining nature of modern life. The protagonist breaks away from these constraints with the unstated understanding that life has no meaning. Sartre would have liked this one. Camus would have loved it.