L'Argent

Robert Bresson's L'Argent shared the Best Director Award at Cannes 1983 with Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia. The film was Bresson's final feature; he was eighty-two when he made it and would not direct again before his death in 1999. L'Argent entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022 and is widely considered one of the most uncompromising late-career works in any director's filmography.

A forged 500-franc note enters circulation in Paris through a small act of teenage commerce. Across the film's runtime the note circulates through Paris and quietly destroys the lives of those who handle it — most catastrophically that of an innocent young deliveryman named Yvon Targe (Christian Patey, a non-professional cast at age 23), who is wrongly arrested for forgery and the consequences of which spiral progressively across the film. The screenplay is loosely adapted from Tolstoy's posthumous 1911 short story The Forged Coupon.

Bresson's commitment to his model — non-professional actors performing without expressivity, the camera attending to hands and small actions rather than faces, the absolute restraint of all conventional dramatic emphasis — produced his most uncompromising late-career work. The film operates simultaneously as procedural drama, theological investigation of moral consequence, and quiet meditation on what a life-time of small economic decisions accumulate into. The film's reception was modest in 1983; its standing has steadily climbed.