Metrograph

A film in which sound, often off-screen, enriches the image, and carries enormous, frequently tragic implications: the tinkling shatter of a glass of white wine seen precipitously perched on an upright piano, the sound of an open palm crossing a young woman’s cheek, the clatter of a cash register drawer. “When a sound can replace an image,” Bresson writes in his Notes on the Cinematographer, “cut the image or neutralize it.” In Jean-Louis Ughetto, he found a simpatico—and amply gifted—accomplice.

“In L’Argent I sense an unconditional surrender to despair and disgust. One can hardly argue that contemporary humanity does not deserve its full quotient of despair and disgust. And it is not even a matter of this social system or that. The rottenness seems to have plunged very deeply into the universal psyche. The artist, however is still obligated to search for order amid the chaos, for beauty amid the ugliness, for truth amid the falsehoods, and, above all, for hope amid the despair… That a filmmaker can lift us to these levels of contemplation and speculation is proof enough of that filmmaker’s greatness” —Andrew Sarris

Distributor: Janus Films