Bresson's final film, and his darkest comedy

Not even ten minutes into L’Argent, every character Bresson introduces in his final film is a liar, cheat, scumbag and hypocrite. Then comes Yvon, the only person at this point in the film whose honest and innocent and ends up having to suffer for other people’s misdeeds. This dude’s life just gets shittier and shittier and shittier and shittier and shittier and shittier and shittier right until the very final frame, where you just lose all remorse and sympathy for this guy yet you understand exactly how and why he got to this level to the point where you can’t even blame him.

In The Safdie Bros. Criterion closet video, Benny oddly hailed this film as a dark comedy and now seeing it again, I firmly believe Bresson 100% knew exactly what he was doing here. There is genuine comedic timing at certain points where he decides to cut to another scene and for Yvon, this is a character you don’t get to know personally. He’s fairly one-dimensional for the majority of the film and as sociopathic as this sounds, that’s exactly why it gets to a point where you can’t help but laugh at this dude’s continuing misery, because the set-up for his tragedy is essentially a stupid schoolboy joke gone wrong yet the cause and effect afterwards is absurdly massive. You just want the universe to give this guy a break and he’s never let out of that grip. Just the fact too that literally every character in a Bresson film is an asshole I just find funny for some absurd reason.

Like many of his films, more notably Pickpocket and Au Hasard Balthazar, there is a strong literary influence ranging from writers like Camus or Kafka, but Dostoyevsky’s influence is hands down the most noticeable, as Yvon’s slow descent into a deeply troubled and remorseless killer resembles Raskolnikov’s destitute and nihilistic descent in Crime And Punishment, especially towards the final quarter in the film where he finds a justification to murder.

This is a film that just fascinated me so much when I first saw it. Bresson is famous for his minimalist approach to filmmaking and that’s why he goes down as one of the greatest to ever direct because I could genuinely continue talking about this super short 85 minute film for ages.