L'Argent

Robert Bresson's L'Argent shared the Best Director Award at Cannes 1983 with Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia. It was Bresson's final feature: he was eighty-two when he made it, and he did not direct again before his death in 1999. L'Argent entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and few directors have made anything so uncompromising, or so cold, this late in their careers.

A forged 500-franc note enters circulation in Paris through a small piece of teenage commerce. From there it passes from hand to hand and does damage to the lives of the people who handle it, one after another, above all an innocent young deliveryman, Yvon Targe (Christian Patey, a non-professional cast at age 23), who is wrongly arrested for forgery. The screenplay is loosely adapted from Tolstoy's posthumous 1911 short story The Forged Coupon.

Bresson's method is at its strictest here: non-professional actors, his "models", performing without expressivity, a camera that attends to hands and small actions in place of faces, and an absolute refusal of conventional dramatic emphasis. The film works as procedural drama, as a theological inquiry into moral consequence, and as a study of what a lifetime of small economic decisions adds up to. Its reception in 1983 was modest, and its standing has climbed steadily ever since.