L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)
Between this, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé/A Man Escaped and some scenes in Pickpocket, I wish Bresson had done more thrillers. I don't know if you could call L'argent a thriller, exactly, but some of it plays that way, though it's of course mostly a tragedy and a condemnation of materialism. I generally don't think Bresson is all that didactic a filmmaker, but it'd be hard to miss his point here, which is that money is the root of all evil... or rather its physical embodiment. It's the first time I've really wondered about Bresson's political stance. There are elements that definitely point towards conservatism (the way he lingers on the "Hôtel moderne" sign, or one of the main characters arguing that he engaged in criminal activities because of the "new ideas" going around which would make his behaviour acceptable), but it's not like he has an idyllic view of the simple country life (see: Balthazar, Mouchette, Diary), so really he's just a Catholic grump, and one could read this whole film as a metaphor of original sin, of the fall of man, just swap the serpent with a 500 francs bill.
Whatever the case may be, Bresson's usual stylistic approach works very well for this story because he doesn't waste time trying to make us too emotionally involved with the characters (the issue I have with Pickpocket), something that the acting style would make impossible anyway. No, it's just people falling down the rabbit hole of sin, just because they see other people doing it and being rewarded for it. As a cycling fan, it makes me think of the way dopers justify it by saying "everyone else was doing it anyway". Well yeah. Bresson takes this exercise to a pretty extreme place by the end here, and even though he never shows us the violence, those final few images are quite disturbing, ending his career with perhaps one of the most striking sequences he's ever directed.
8/10