In his book about Bresson’s “transcendental style,” Paul Schrader argues that Bresson sought a kind of purity of form to avoid editorializing and create objective distance, like a surveillance camera. The result is an uncompromising film in its stylistic austerity and brutal perspective, sometimes described as objectivity. He was 82 years old and had grown disenchanted with what he learned from a lifetime of experience. But it’s also his angriest and most cynical film, one in which the sometimes Catholic, sometimes atheistic filmmaker characterizes his lost faith in humanity and bleak worldview. His thirteenth film in a career spanning 40 years, its deliberate pacing and visual exactitude resemble his other works, including A Man Escaped (1956) and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). L’Argent finds the director once more refining the moving image down to its essence, following his career-long ambition to create an imperative form of cinema. With L’Argent, Bresson considers how money is not just an economic unit that passes from one person to the next it’s a force that drives our desires and has chilling consequences every time it changes hands.

Following a counterfeit 500-franc bill, Bresson’s parabolic film watches how a single petty crime unravels several lives. Filmed in Bresson’s usual straightforward style without compositional flourishes, the film shows how materialism infects his characters-sending the protagonist, Yvon, on a trajectory from a blue-collar worker to a bank robber, from a prison inmate to an axe murderer. In doing so, his film classifies capitalism as all-corrupting.

With his meticulous approach to craft and structure, Bresson portrays an evil that spreads out from an act of forgery like a disease. L’Argent ( Money ) is Bresson’s final film, and his take on Tolstoy’s story characterizes people as rapacious and violent, and our society as cruel and unjust. In his essays about aesthetic theory, Leo Tolstoy talks about art arising from “the artist’s soul, which, when expressed, lights up the path along which humanity progresses.” Adapting Tolstoy’s novella The Forged Coupon, French filmmaker Robert Bresson uses cinema to illuminate the dark path of humanity.

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