The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 12-18
L’Argent (1983)
Directed by Robert Bresson
Is there a more commanding and daring last work? A hateful prose poem spat into the eyes of a man created god on his way to retirement and death, its power stuffed like explosives into drum-tight interiors. The greens that will greet our hero after a small eternity of castigating browns, greys and off-whites, are as much a lie as the promise of limitless economic growth. The film’s disturbing spiral towards the blackest truths, like a capitalist death roll, jaws sunk into unwitting pawns, is as unforgettably bone-shaking as the guitar solo in “Anarchy in the UK” or the voices of Nico and Nina Simone. Bresson’s eulogy for the future seethes like an attack dog, eyes patiently darting from one misfit to another until it lands on the one who cannot defend himself. Finality itself is ultimately L’Argent‘s subject, the resting place of a lifelong search for truth in moving images. This is as true and purposeful as cinematography can be. This is Bresson’s goodbye fifteen years before his death. He’d said all he needed to. He’d brought film to a place from which it could thankfully never return. Scout Tafoya (October 12, 6:30pm as part of the Revivals program within the 54th New York Film Festival)