Directed by Robert Bresson • 1983 • France, Switzerland
Starring Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline Lang
In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L’ARGENT follows a counterfeit bill as it originates as a prop in a schoolboy prank, then circulates like a virus among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver and leading him to incarceration and violence. With brutal economy, Bresson constructs his unforgiving vision of original sin out of starkly perceived details, rooting his characters in a dehumanizing material world that withholds any hope of transcendence.
Up Next in Lions in Winter
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Identification of a Woman
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1982 • Italy
Starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine BoissonMichelangelo Antonioni’s IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness. After his wife leaves him, a film director finds him...
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The Home and the World
Directed by Satyajit Ray • 1984 • India
Both a romantic-triangle tale and a philosophical take on violence in times of revolution, The Home and the World, set in early twentieth-century Bengal, concerns an aristocratic but progressive man who, in insisting on broadening his more traditional wife...
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An Autumn Afternoon
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1962 • Japan
Starring Chishu Ryu, Shima Iwashita, Keiji SadaThe last film by Yasujiro Ozu was also his final masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignifed resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization. Though the widower Shuhei...
