L'Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

[This is my March entry for my Blind Spots selections]

Robert Bresson famously referred to his non-professional actors as models, and he even more famously bypassed people altogether when he chose an animal to be the centerpiece of Au hasard Balthazar. Why not, then, extrapolate even further and cast an inanimate object as the lead? Bresson's final film, L'Argent, settles on a nominal protagonist after a fluid opening sequence, but its true centerpiece is its titular object, an item of artificially created meaning and worth but one that is, in the words of one character, "God incarnate."

Bresson's films, despite their stark framing and minute focus on detail, always seem to capture the world, and generally not in flattering terms. But there is nevertheless some kind of release to his work, even if it occasionally borders on Flannery O'Connor levels of grotesquely ironic. Such a release is absent in L'Argent, which ends on one of the most profoundly unsettling notes I've ever seen. Some directors grow soft with age; Bresson, 81 when the film premiered, unleashed his most unsparing evaluation of the human race in a career rife with piercing, harsh insights.

A Man Escaped

For those uninitiated with the work of Robert Bresson, the very title of his 1956 masterpiece, A Man Escaped, may suggest a hopeful movie. The story of a French Resistance fighter imprisoned by the Nazis in Vichy, Bresson's film gives away from the start that Fontaine (François Leterrier) will break free of his bondage. But that knowledge does not undermine Bresson's preternatural ability to eke suspense from anything, whether the story of a Nietzschian thief or a donkey doubling as Christ, by mixing a stark, precise aesthetic with metaphysical musings that seem, on paper, completely opposed to each other.

The characters in Bresson's films are not given to engaging in open philosophical soliloquies, drawing their worldviews instead from matter-of-fact observations and reasoning for actions that communicate a progression of the spirit as much as the plot. Fontaine is no different: on his way to Montluc prison at the start, the prisoner lunges out of his car, only to be immediately re-captured and viciously pistol-whipped for his offense. Fontaine's first lines come in the form of a voiceover, calmly describing the injuries he suffered from the beating while sitting on his prison cot covered in his own blood. The dispassion of Fontaine's narration present the freedom fighter as a man unafraid of death, hardened through his struggle into an unbreakable spirit.

However, his thoughts soon turn to escape, where they stay for the rest of the film. Fontaine meticulously plans his breakout, setting aside just enough time to write a message to his comrades warning them that the Germans have broken their code before setting out to carve his way out of Montluc. The detail eclipses even that of Pickpocket as Fontaine carefully fashions what meager items he can get his hands on -- like a spoon or the the wire of his bed frame -- into instruments to chip away at the wooden boards of his door and bind ropes made from torn clothes.

The precise detail of Fontaine's plan, delivered through exacting narration and the crisp realism of Bresson's mise-en-scène, generate suspense through their intricacy: far from a mere device to boast of accuracy and conducting research, the complexity and longevity of Fontaine's scheming allows Bresson to build the prisoner's plight into a thriller: even with the ending in the title, we know that a single kink in the plan can unravel everything Fontaine has accomplished over months of deliberately paced subterfuge. Without ever sensationalizing the action -- by running in the opposite direction, in fact -- the glacial pace creates more discomfort than any other prison escape film I've seen, and Bresson does not even show violence and prisoner abuse on-screen, much less the more salacious side of the prison movie.

Bresson's habit of relegating the most horrific action just outside the frame, a habit he would develop to its zenith in Au hasard Balthazar, allows him to imbue his film with the true, confined feelings of a prison by defining this diegetic world through the whistles, clattering footfalls and shouted orders of the prison guards that constantly clamor around Fontaine's cell, rising and falling as they increase and decrease in proximity but always communicating the possibility of a guard hearing the scratching Fontaine's tools emit -- made out to be deafening in their skittering rasps. The beating of a fellow inmate and his eventual execution are "shown" only in the form of muffled sounds of thudding punches and the ratatat of machine gunfire, letting our imagination supply the images in contrast to the borderline oversharing of detail in what is actually shown. Bresson uses as many close-ups on hands as he would in Pickpocket, starting with the opening scenes of Fontaine's hand creeping toward the door latch as the German driver downshifts gears, each close-up of his own hands generating a brief moment of doubt as to whether he will speed back up again or finally stop the car. This combination of attention to detail and more open-ended elision forms an aesthetic foil for the thematic approach of the material.

Fontaine's refusal to accept his fate, even when faced with an execution sentence, sets him apart from so many other Bresson characters. Unlike the Raskolnikov stand-in of Pickpocket, who justified his actions to himself, and poor Balthazar, dragged around by his various masters, Fontaine believes in free will. This is an oddity in Bresson's canon, to the point that even the other characters of A Man Escaped begin to view the protagonist as a larger-than-life being: when one prisoner remarks that no one can change fate, another breathlessly says, "He can." No one else has even attempted to escape, thinking it impossible, but Fontaine's resolve reignites the fire in several other inmates. His dedication demonstrates a resolve long ago purged from his comrades, and the blood that stains Fontaine's clothes takes on a cleansing, semi-religious property despite its filthy look and its mortal connotations.

For Fontaine's escape attempt, motivated, according to him, as the result of "luck and idleness," is really a test of faith. If a portion of his plan goes awry and the whole construct unravels, then that scheme requires a great deal of faith. And what may at first seem like cowardice and fear of death slowly morphs into a more redemptive arc, as Fontaine begins to use his clout with the other prisoners to help boost their morale, encouraging the other prisoner attempting to escape to "be strong." Fontaine's perseverance becomes even more visible an act of conviction when the other prisoners start to lose their own faith in him, believing Fontaine to be acting too slowly in his gentle chiseling and rope tying.

The way in which Bresson equates the risks Fontaine takes in his actions and the underlying themes of salvation and faith makes a strong case for A Man Escaped as one of the director's finest works (admittedly a largely redundant distinction): when an old prisoner walks by Fontaine's first cell and smuggles him items and offers to get a message to Fontaine's comrades still fighting, the protagonist must decide whether this man is sincere in his promises of risking his and his daughter's life to smuggle out letters or if he's a broken dissident who will rat to the guards. Likewise, when guards dump a teenager named Jost in Fontaine's cell shortly before Fontaine's execution, the doomed prisoner wonders if the new guy, who joined the German army in hopes of self-preservation, is nothing more than a collaborateur sent to pry information from a man possibly made willing to speak to save his skin. Faced with the option of killing Jost and getting back to his escape, Fontaine ultimately decides to trust the kid and bring him along in the escape. This act completes his progression from a fearful, self-absorbed caged rat trying to claw his way to freedom to a truly compassionate individual giving a much younger individual a second chance to live a life about to be denied him.

Furthermore, this act reflects Bresson's practice of using his films as larger commentaries on French society, commentaries that are usually bleak and highly critical. Here, however, the director really does give in to the hope contained in the title, fashioning Fontaine into a symbol of the Resistance helping Jost (whose mixture of French and German uniforms clearly identifies him as a representative of Vichy). Yet Bresson does not cast aside the conquered French: "Alone, I might have remained there," Fontaine muses, acknowledging both the impracticality and the worthlessness of pursuing goals solo as well as the wrongheaded dismissal of those not openly members of the Resistance in the rebuilding of France.

Only Bresson could juggle this imagery without once sacrificing the immediacy and relevancy of the story as its own end. "This is a true story," Bresson reminds us at the start, though one can easily dispute his claim that he tells it "as it happened, unadorned." Based on the memoirs of André Devigny, Bresson swaps out the author's courage for the more flawed desire for self-preservation in Fontaine. However, the director does not disrespect Devigny with this change, instead infusing his own youthful experience as a prisoner in Vichy for being a member of the Resistance. And by altering the protagonist into a character faced with fears and doubts, Bresson molds the story not into a hollow display of inspirational pluck but a far more spiritually engaging work that ultimately draws true inspiration by allowing us to see a man become a hero rather than a hero simply act according to his nature. For those who complain that Bresson could be too arch and bleak in his vision, A Man Escaped manages to be both while overcoming these traits: the structure works on an allegorical level as a study of France during World War II, yet it also presents perhaps the director's most human, endearing narrative. I may prefer the more scabrous and damning Au hasard Balthazar, but I'll be revisiting this feature just as often.

Au hasard Balthazar

Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar announces its originality and deep knowledge of the art of cinema and the individual elements that it comprises before the film even begins. The opening credits of older films can be somewhat tedious (though preferable to the current setup, in which the caterer's assistant gets a mention in the endless closing scroll), a bit of bombastic fanfare over still images of text that often clashes harshly with the content of the film itself.

Balthazar opens in a similar fashion, the lilting strains of Schubert's piano sonata no. 20 filling our ears and inviting us calmly into the movie. Then, the music abruptly halts, replaced by the sounds of agonized braying as a donkey gives birth to a foal. The intense screeching carries on for a few seconds before Schubert comes back in as if nothing ever happened. In this sequence is the entire film: a fleeting moment of beauty scarred by pure, rending pain.

It also establishes one of the key aspects of the film's technical mastery: Bresson's use of sound. The audio track of the film is crystal clear, and much of the noises we hear occur somewhere off-screen. Planes flying overhead, cars revving past characters framed in close-up. Godard said of the film that it was "the world in an hour and a half," and this usage of sound outside the frame helps craft a world through which the camera moves as opposed to a strict narrative that focuses only on what's immediate.

This would also explain the editing, an elliptical staging that often skips a number of steps between scenes. After the credits sequence, Balthazar opens on the mare having given birth to her foal as it suckles for the first time. A man and his children approach and the kids beg the man to purchase the foal. He refuses, yet in the very next cut we see the man and the kids headed home with the donkey in tow, where they baptize him. How did the kids convince the adult? Perhaps Bresson suggests that the power of children to influence those who should know better is absolute, and that's about as close as the film ever gets to anything cheery. Soon after, the man's ailing daughter dies, so he takes his son Jacques and leaves the farm. The timeline jumps several years, as the young girl, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), Jacques' childhood friend, has grown up and lives on the land left to her father, a schoolteacher, by Jacques' dad. They still own the anointed Balthazar, whom Marie treats with tender care, but disputes between Marie and Jacques' fathers over profits from the land, combined with the indefatigable pride of Marie's pop, take everything from the family. As a result, Marie must part with her beloved donkey.

Balthazar is generally accepted to be a Christ parable, with the titular donkey traveling through various situations of abuse and neglect that reflect the Stations of the Cross, and Bresson's strong Catholic upbringing certainly lends credence to this interpretation. It's a justifiable explanation, but one that could easily mislead those who haven't seen the film. Those who would claim the film as a spiritually validating work -- Balthazar is listed as the 6th most spiritually significant film by Arts & Faith -- ignore the abysmally deep level of cynicism on display.

Consider that elliptical editing. Most of it skips over what might have been endearing or at least lighter moments to create harsh juxtapositions. One of the boys in town leads a biker gang: like a combination of Brando's roles in The Wild Ones and A Streetcar Named Desire, he wreaks havoc yet manages to retain some semblance of charisma. We see him leering hungrily at Marie and dumping oil in the middle of the road to cause passing drivers to lose control of their vehicles. Yet the next scene shows the townspeople in church, as the young rapscallion wows the crowd, and especially the previously disgusted Marie, with his angelic singing voice, emphasizing how hollow and meaningless church attendance and participation is as a barometer of morality. The thug, Gérard, and his family buy Balthazar, and the boy tortures the poor beast by burning and beating it even as he exploits it to get closer to Marie. Arnold, the local drunk, takes Balthazar when the creature nears death from a harsh winter, and we then see him leading a healthy donkey around the city. Bresson skips whatever nursing care might have healed Balthazar to jump to Arnold showing off the creature before beating it in a drunken rage. Later, he swears on the Virgin Mary to give up alcohol, yet in the next scene he is guzzling another bottle.

Every edit seems to paint a bleaker portrait of mankind, whether it follows the donkey or Marie. Both, in essence, are treated the same way, shuffled off from one abusive, domineering master to the next. Yet there occasionally converging arcs differ in their subtext: Balthazar's story reveals the ineffectual, even cruel, nature of religion and the Church, while Marie's trials bring out the dispassionate pain brought on by modernity. Those cars and planes that pass by outside the periphery highlight how stifling the world has become. The schoolteacher prospers with the farm because he follows traditional methods as laid out in old almanacs and guides, and he is undone by lawsuits. Marie's own status as every bit the tradable community that the donkey is comments on the same thread Godard spent most of the '60s examining, that of the sociopolitical pressures weighing down women. Gérard abuses her, horribly so near the end, and at one point she winds up at the home of the miller, a miserly old man, soaking wet and starving. She brushes off the lecherous man's advances at first, but he offers her money, which she takes in order to help her father. "That’s what happens when you region honor above everything," the miller says, "He’s spent his life creating obligations for himself. What for? …Do I have any obligations? I’m free, obliged only to do what serves my interests and can bring me a profit. Life’s nothing but a dazzling ground, a marketplace where even your word is unnecessary. A bank stamp will do." Modernity has placed a price on everything, including decency and independence.

The blocking of the film could be another jab at modernization. Balthazar is one of the most meticulously blocked and visually orchestrated films I have ever seen, each character arranged in such a way as to be immediately identifiable and separated from the crowd. In retaliation to the influence of verité among the contemporary French filmmakers and their attempts to find truth by staging their films as if accidents (and perhaps as a response to his own Pickpocket), Bresson makes here a film that, for all its minimalism, makes no bones about its staging. How strange and perfect, then, that it should paint a more complete portrait of the world than the up-and-comers. Martin Scorsese once said, "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out," and Au hasard Balthazar stands balanced between the two, placing as much emphasis and weight onto the sounds of objects and people outside the frame as the carefully blocked mise-en-scène; characters often stand slightly out-of-frame as if to further stress this dichotomy. Bresson combines the two into a nearly hopeless vision of the present, yet one that proves emotionally visceral and incessantly moving. Besides, if the boring, clinging Jacques, the symbol of a more traditional time in Marie's life, is any indicator -- to say nothing of Balthazar's status as a Jesus stand-in -- the director hardly has any flowery thoughts for the past either.

The final section of the film bridges the two storylines as the narrative builds into a massive rejection of the social and religious constraints that no longer hold any meaning. Marie's father turns his back on the priest as he sits on his deathbed. Outside, his wife prays, "Lord, don’t take him from me too. Wait. You know how sad and miserable my life will be.” Before she can finish the final syllable, the priest beckons her inside to find her husband dead. She then treats Balthazar, returned to the farm, as a saint in honor of her husband, a moment that combines so much despair, delusion and desperation I started to check the credits for "Ingmar Bergman" or some alias thereof.

Nothing can compare, however, to the ending, as Balthazar, burdened as ever with contraband, collapses on a hill and dies as if on his Golgotha. After watching the poor ass' mistreatment through winces for an hour and a half, this quiet moment of death hits harder than all the previous torture. It is said that the ending is transcendental, the capper to the Christ parable that communicates His sacrifice. To that I would ask how anyone could find redemption or the slightest sliver of faith in this scene. Balthazar is initially surrounded by a group of sheep -- sheep of course being one of the most dominant symbols in Judeo-Christian mythology -- but the flock moves on as he dies, a visualization of the rejection of Christ at his death but also clear, terrible proof that Jesus, despite being killed as public entertainment, died alone. Further calling attention to the hollowness, the horror and the pain of this moment is the final shot, as we can clearly see the donkey still breathing. Perhaps the ass they used was simply a "bad actor," but to see the beast still breathing, to be dying instead of dead, adds a whole other dimension of suffering and agony. Frankly, I should have known better, as Bresson clues us in from the start. "Au hasard" means "by chance," proving that this donkey isn't Jesus: it's just a beast like any other, left to die alone in a field.

Au hasard Balthazar is a technical marvel and an emotionally draining experience. It is one of the greatest masterpieces I have ever seen. I cannot claim it to be Bresson's finest, having seen only two of his features, but if he made a better film then he must be one of the truest masters the cinema ever saw (even if he didn't, that claim is hard to argue). But spiritual? Tell that to the carcass rotting out in the French countryside.

Pickpocket

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket is, from one point of view, a watered-down version of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, one that replaces the murderous, possibly insane former student Raskolnikov with a mere petty thief and adjusts the vitriol of the work accordingly. But Pickpocket is one of the few films that just about every cineaste would name a masterpiece. Heck, when you factor in some people's inherent need to rail against the universally beloved, Pickpocket likely has more ardent defenders than Citizen Kane. That can certainly be attributed to the visual style, which mixes the sociopolitical relevance and emotional identification of de Sica with the aesthetic perfection of Kubrick, but Bresson's script does not lose focus for taming his intelligent-but-disaffected protagonist; rather, he uses his blank pickpocket to reveal the corruption and oppressive greed of society.

Unlike Raskolnikov, Michel turns to crime before he runs out of options. The Russian was starving, an ex-student because he couldn't afford food, much less university tuition, but Michel simply finds pleasure in theft. Bresson liked to use nonprofessional actors, but Martin LaSalle is so perfect in the role it's hard to imagine a star upstaging him. In LaSalle Bresson has a perfect blank slate: emotions never race across Michel's face, even as he explains in voiceovers his fear during his man larcenous engagements.

Michel is caught and arrested after his first theft, but the cops must release him due to lack of evidence. Undeterred, he returns to thieving, and even in his dispassionate narration we hear hints of excitement with his new "profession." He does not visit his ailing mother, cannot act upon his initial feelings for the woman who lives next to his mother and asks him to visit more often, but he cannot control the impulse to steal. Bresson inserts numerous shots of Michel's hands, photographing them with crystal clarity as he exercises them, writes with them and nicks wallets. He devotes so much attention to them not only because the film's action occurs through them but because they are the conduits that re-connect Michel to the world around him.

A concerned friend arranges a meeting with the police inspector to try to talk some sense into the crook, but Michel simply regales the inspector with his feeble Nietzschian idea of supermen who are above the law. Nietzsche was at the heart of Crime and Punishment as well, but Bresson takes the character in another direction. Michel isn't above society so much as outside of it on the same axis: he recognizes that society is spiritually empty, fueled by a greed that he ironically never feels. But Michel also wants to be a part of it; he wants to muster up the strength to face his dying mom, he wants to ask out Jeanne, but he just can't do it. Larceny then becomes more a sexual experience than a quest for money, and he worries about cops finding his stash of money because of its psychological, possibly sexual attachment. In some ways, Bresson filters the concept of the Ubermensch through the guilt that can only come from a Catholic upbringing.

Bresson liked to use an "actor-model" technique, wherein he stripped away the conventions of theatricality through strict rehearsals and choreographed everything to be at once naturalistic and so thoroughly planned that the actors seem mere puppets standing in for the director. It's a tricky balance, but it pays off in Bresson's execution: everyone, down to the extras, makes every movement with visible determination, and here it highlights the perfunctory nature of the world. Everything is calculated, all interactions choreographed according to mores and traditions; in this world, the unemotive Michel the most expressive of all.

Only twice does he betray any feelings to other characters. When the cops begin to apply too much pressure, Michel harangues the police inspector, but the way he methodically throws down a book to express his anger reveals how he's just putting on a show for the inspector, thinking that outrage is what a normal person would feel. The other display appears genuine; at last captured, Michel sits in prison in the end, removed from the confines of society and at last free -- has the incessant irony of this film sunk in yet? -- and so he can finally engage with the visiting Jeanne, who paves the path to his redemption, if you can call it that.

Pickpocket has some of the most strikingly aesthetic "streets" shots this side of Scorsese's early work. In particular, the scene where Michel and a group of other thieves orchestrate thefts on a train is, despite its brief length and lack of music, one of the most thrillingly edited action sequences ever filmed. Interestingly, neither the visual style nor the brilliant story takes precedence in the film; both aspects are so good and Bresson is such a master that the plot serves the aesthetics and vice versa. He might have made better films, but Bresson proves with his first original screenplay that he was a talent for the ages.