L'argent

Saw L'argent, an unsparing film about justice. It opens with two rich boys scheming on how to get rid of a counterfeit note. They pass it off to a photography shop which passes the note off to a septic worker who at last catches the blame. He is unaware of the nature of the bill and is done an injustice. This being a cruel sort of film, he goes to jail. The judge who sentences him is attractive, indicating that this will not be a film with clear villains. Criminal law and justice is not being skewered here. Rather, this is a sort of meditation on the corrupting nature of crime. Things get worse and worse for our protagonist while the crooked clerk who originally fobbed off the bill continues a life of petty white-collar crime, eventually becoming a sort of Robin Hood character. The rich kids 'fess up to their parents who discretely drop a bribe and than vanish from the film entirely.

Almost everyone comes off badly. The rich people are infuriatingly exempt from the laws us mere mortals are subject to. The crooked clerk has grandiose visions of self-importance and loftily talks about his philosophy not recognizing such petty things as "laws." The central man, the septic worker, goes to jail where he continues to be arbitrarily victimized. He starts off as a stoic martyr but quickly begins to earn his punishment (or, perhaps, to be corrupted by the injustice of it all.)

There's a very important-seeming sequence later, after jail, when he stays at a woman's house who seems to be supporting four of her relatives on her own. He has by this point embraced the injustice of the world and therefore a life of crime. The woman, in contrast, has never expected justice and is therefore not outraged at the lack of it. She martyr-ishly toils on, uncomplaining. She has an effect on him that seems positive and redemptive but it may be that his watchful pauses are only him hatching further schemes. We close up on an axe. Police follow the old woman, as if to inform her of her house being robbed, but they turn away at the last second, revealing this to have been a fake-out. We are kept in the dark until the very abrupt end of the film.

The film is shot in a slightly jarring manner. It spot-focuses on small details. A hand grabbing a lapel, the sound of footsteps on stairs. Several shots are entirely static, telling the story only through off-screen sound. It's very austere, but not too boring. I was able to keep awake anyway. The subject matter is a bit heavy and the plot is full of kinks and twists, the better to keep us guessing about the film's stance on justice/redemption/etc. I enjoyed it pretty well, but it's not an every-day kind of movie.