Seemly economy: L’Argent’s aesthetic currency

This essay argues that Robert Bresson’s final film L’Argent (1983) refuses to differentiate between financial and spiritual models of ‘redemption’. Almost every commentator on L’Argent insists that the film establishes a stark contrast between the economic circulation of value in money and the genuine value of human life, and that it aims to strip away the structures of legitimation by which capitalist ideology attempts to conceal or justify exploitation. In this reading, the film is a demystifying protest against the capitalist economy’s violation of the sanctity of human life. But a careful assessment of L’Argent’s aesthetic suggests instead that it works to include the value of human life within the purview of economic circulation, not because life is not especially valuable, but because no notion of value can evade economic considerations. L’Argent stages the drama of value in spatial terms. Starting from a rigorously anonymous and depersonalized kind of space that it associates with late-capitalist Paris, the film posits another kind of a space, a redemptive space that would be determined by the beautiful human bodies that occupy it. The film reveals, however, that this utopian space of bodily richness is itself an outgrowth and consequence of commodity culture which it cannot transcend.