L’Argent (1983)

France / Switzerland, 85 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Leo Tolstoy, Robert Bresson

Photography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Music: J.S. Bach

Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Cast: Christian Patey, Sylvia Van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang

Director and screenwriter Robert Bresson adapted a long tale by Leo Tolstoy as the basis for his last picture (translated as “The Counterfeit Bills” or “The Forged Coupon”). The result, L’Argent, is perhaps less about the evils of money (“l’argent” in French) and more a kind of practical thought experiment in the chaos theory butterfly effect, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead by circumstances to events as devastating as tornados, or as wonderful as an unexpected windfall. Anything might happen when it comes to cause and effect. It’s hard to say why the title was not translated for English-speaking countries. In Spain and Mexico, for example, it was released as El dinero. Perhaps calling it “Money” would imply too much about the intended evils thereof? But then what are people supposed to think anywhere else?

This story starts with adolescents in need of spending money who forge counterfeit bills and pass them to a camera shop. The camera shop manager, realizing later that he has been bilked, decides to pass the bills himself and does so the next day, paying a delivery driver, Yvon (Christian Patey), who accepts them without question. It’s the beginning of the end for Yvon. His superiors catch the counterfeits, but Yvon’s story does not hold up when the camera shop staff denies even knowing him. This seems a little unlikely given the way these things are tracked, with invoices and receipts and such, but maybe it was different in 1983 in France. Yvon goes to trial for the crime. He’s convicted and given three years, and then things only get worse. His child dies while he’s in prison and his wife leaves him for a new life. He keeps getting in trouble and fights with other inmates. His imprisonment is extended. He’s all the way into a terrible downward spiral.

Mouchette (1967)

France, 81 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Georges Bernanos, Robert Bresson

Photography: Ghislain Cloquet

Music: Jean Wiener

Editor: Raymond Lamy

Models: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Marie Cardinal, Paul Hebert, Jean Vimenet, Marie Susini

The internet is not particularly helping me with the title of this picture by director and cowriter Robert Bresson. Mouchette, a favorite of Kelly Reichardt and Andrei Tarkovsky (not to mention the Criterion company), has surprisingly few "also known as" versions of the title listed on IMDb. Bresson, or someone, was not budging on this one. So Google Translate says it means "handkerchief" in French while other dictionaries describe an architectural feature. "Mouchet" means "speckle" and "mouche" means "fly" (noun), which both seem closer to the intent here. Wikipedia weighs in with "little fly." It appears thus to be an affectionate (and/or demeaning) name, like "sweetie" or "kiddo," for the main character, a girl of about 14 (though played by a 19-year-old, Nadine Nortier). Mouchette and her family come from an impoverished and abusive background in the French countryside and this movie is the story of her life—sad, grim, and short (I think—the ending is ambiguous of course).

In keeping with Bresson's aesthetic, Nortier and most of the other players are amateurs who basically appeared only in this picture (though Jean-Luc Godard may have borrowed a couple of them for Weekend, another movie from 1967, and Jean-Claude Guilbert is also in the 1966 Au hasard Balthazar). I respect this aesthetic as an aspect of naturalism, even when it's Jack Webb deploying it, but I'm not sure the desired effect always comes through. Professionals may come with artifice but they also tend to have theatrical skills. Bresson's use of amateurs is further undermined by an evident requirement of being beautiful. This frankly baffles me as in effect it only piles on the artifice, which I thought he was against. Bunuel's Los Olvidados, for example, with its mix of grotesques as well as natural beauties, works much better as naturalism.

A Man Escaped (1956)

Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, France, 101 minutes
Director: Robert Bresson
Writers: Andre Devigny, Robert Bresson
Photography: Leonce-Henri Burel
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Francois Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod, Jacques Ertaud, Jean-Paul Delhumeau, Roger Treherne

Like Au Hasard Balthazar and Pickpocket, which precede A Man Escaped in the top 100 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, director and screenwriter Robert Bresson's picture largely succeeds because it latches onto certain concrete circumstances. In the first two it's the life of a beast and the criminal art of pickpocketing, respectively, and in A Man Escaped it is the amazingly painstaking escape of a Frenchman from a German prison during World War II, based on true events. In fact, though I don't like it as much as the other two, in many ways A Man Escaped is the one that's most getting right down to the business of Bresson's major theme: the gyrations of the soul imprisoned in the flesh. That prison is perfectly externalized by the Montluc prison in Lyon, France, where the movie was shot and from which the original true-life escape was made.

As usual, some allowances must be made for changing times. The privations of the prison may look to us now more like a very bad dorm. Everyone's clothes are elaborately dirty but otherwise these prisoners don't look too much the worse for wear. Yes, we often hear shocking bursts of gunfire, suggesting executions (as most of the prisoners believe), or perhaps escape attempts cut down. But we actually see very little violence. The prisoners and guards seem mostly docile and without the air of aggression projected in modern prison scenes. Guards here are peevish and rude more than hostile, and inmates mostly just sullen. This is more of an existential imprisonment. It doesn't look like any kind of place I'd want to spend time, but it's preferable to the prisons we see in popular culture these days, where the preoccupation is rape, followed by random death by shiv. No one gives any thought to rape here, and the closest thing to a shiv is used only to help engineer the escape.

Pickpocket (1959)

France, 75 minutes
Director/writer: Robert Bresson
Photography: Leonce-Henri Burel
Music: J.B. Lulli
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Cesar Gattegno, Pierre Leymarie, Jean Pelegri, Pierre Etaix, Kassagi, Dolly Scal

All movies by director and writer Robert Bresson are at least a little odd—austere, slow-moving affairs, marked by confounding editing rhythms and unnatural performances from stunningly beautiful people. In line with the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, I probably like Pickpocket second-best of all his movies, after Au Hasard Balthazar. It attempts to do a few things at once: retell Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment story, demonstrate the grace and practical realities of pickpocketing (the movie was actually banned for a time in Finland as too instructive), and, as ever from the deeply spiritual Roman Catholic filmmaker, ask us to ponder the eternal mystery of living. The question Bresson forever pursues is how to show the movements of the soul. I have mixed feelings about that, but I don't doubt his sincerity, for all the obvious potential for pretension and all he may be held responsible for.

Frankly, in Balthazar, I'm more interested in the donkey, and in Pickpocket, I'm more interested in the tricks of the deft criminal trade. Pickpocket is not exactly documentary, and not really that informative either (Finland notwithstanding). But it's typically clinical, with appropriate numerous close-ups on hands in action. As criminal skills go, pickpocketing is arguably one of the most theatrical, involving close work with blind hands and fingers and a magician's ability to distract coupled with a skill for going still in a crowd to become invisible. I've seen footage of stage magicians picking pockets and removing watches and belts from apparently oblivious audience volunteers. Among other things, Pickpocket validates that incredible spectacle with examples of intricate wallet lifting (solo and in teams) and even watches removed from wrists with their owners unaware.

Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

France/Sweden, 95 minutes
Director/writer: Robert Bresson
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Jean Wiener, Franz Schubert
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Balthazar, Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green, François Lafarge, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Philippe Asselin, Pierre Klossowski, Nathalie Joyaut

I have a great fondness for Robert Bresson's donkey movie, which is typically enough fractured, allusive, and blunt, helped in great measure by a basic narrative element barely in Bresson's control, if it is in his control at all. Back in film appreciation classes, I was given to understand that the somewhat stultifying Diary of a Country Priest was Bresson's essential go-to masterpiece so it's interesting to me that Balthazar is now ranked highest among the canonizers at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, followed by Pickpocket (my other favorite Bresson), A Man Escaped, Mouchette, L'Argent, and then finally Country Priest at #196. Despite that apparent fall in favor by Country Priest, a total of six titles in that list's top 200 clearly signals a regard for Bresson that may be higher than ever.

The element barely under control, of course, is Balthazar, who is an enigma in the way of all animals we may come to know, a blank slate as such, one that as viewers (and/or caretakers) we may be quick to fill in. Bresson artfully matches his usual bent for ambiguity—as always, the intent appears to be to film the ineffable—with the manifest reality of the donkey, which I think is what makes this movie work so well. However abstracted anything around it might seem to become, it remains the story of a life from beginning to end, "Balthazar, told by random incident" (more or less the translation of the title).

Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

#16: Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

You don't have to be an animal lover to appreciate Robert Bresson's donkey movie, but it probably doesn't hurt. I have a feeling anyway that might be a significant piece of the huge wallop it manages to deliver for me. But this one moves in mysterious ways. I only saw it for the first time a year or two ago but have been in thrall to it since. The title doesn't translate to English well—roughly, it appears to mean "Balthazar by happenstance," Balthazar being the donkey. Accordingly, it's about as episodic in its brief running time as it can be, moving fitfully and elliptically across the life of the donkey from its early life as a colt adopted by a provincial family as a pet until its death many years later. The people in this picture responsible for it or involved with it figure large as well, notably the young girl who first cared for it, Marie. All of them tend to be weak or cruel or both, tragically so.

I also don't think you have to be Catholic to appreciate it, an overlay that I take as a bit of a red herring and mostly beside the point. I haven't seen much Bresson because of the heavily Catholic allegorical interpretations so often made of his work (which admittedly can be hard to get away from, as in the other title of his with which I'm familiar, Diary of a Country Priest). To be blunt about it and attempt to dispose the thread, Balthazar's story does not seem to me to remotely resemble the Jesus story, though some of the elements are there, as can be seen in the clips. In most ways I think it's almost naturalistic about the life of a beast of burden.