DIRECTOR: Robert Bresson
PRODUCERS: Jean-Marc Henchoz, Daniel Toscan du Plantier 
PRODUCTION CO: Eos Films, France 3 Cinéma, Marion's Films
SCREENPLAY: Robert Bresson, based on the story, 'The Forged Coupon' by Leo Tolstoy
PHOTOGRAPHY: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel
EDITOR: Jean-François Naudon
MUSIC: Johann Sebastian Bach
WITH: Christian Patey (Yvon Targe), Vincent Risterucci (Lucien), Caroline Lang (Elise), Sylvie Van Den Elsen (Little Old Lady), Michel Brigue (Father of the Little Old Lady), Béatrice Tabourin (Photographer), Didier Baussy (Photographer), Marc Ernest Fourneau (Norbert), André Cler (Norbert's Father), Claude Cler (Norbert's Mother), Bruno Lapeyre (Martial)

FESTIVALS: Cannes

REVIEWS

"Robert Bresson’s final film [is]  an adaptation of Tolstoy’s story The Forged Coupon…. The story of a counterfeit bill’s passage from hand to hand and the resulting tragic consequences is rendered with a clean force that would be startling from a filmmaker of any age; coming from one in his early 80s, it was, and still is, astonishing. L’argent burns white hot – not with anger but with a perfect clarity of purpose: to direct us to see that habitual human callousness is what keeps us out of paradise." 

- Film at Lincoln Center


"Bresson's rarely seen colour films of the 1970s appear to render an increasingly ambiguous verdict on the relationship between man, God and the world. It's often startling to encounter motorbikes or transistor radios or rock music in Bresson - he seems to belong to a pre-technological era - but it's safe to say he generally views such things in a baleful light. If anything, as the settings and themes grow more modern in pictures like… L'Argent (his final film, made in 1983), Bresson's rejection of modernity grows more forceful. In Kent Jones' wonderful phrase, it's as if he has 'drifted to the edge of his 'Christian universe' and measured the void beyond on behalf of his defeated protagonists'."

​– Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Wellington   
Monday, 3 October, 6.15pm

Auckland 
Monday, 25 October, 6:15pm 
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