“I’ll be a good guy when I’m rich.”

Bresson may have refuted a personal belief in predestination, but in L’Argent, the fate of Yvon the protagonist is sealed from the beginning. There is no benevolent God in the world of L’Argent, as there was in Diary of a Country Priest - he’s either long gone or chooses not to intervene in the senseless killings at the end. Instead, money is god (“the visible God”, as described by Yvon’s cellmate) and it…

The first Bresson film that achieves his stated intention to make an audience “feel the presence of God in ordinary life.” The protracted, self-imposed suffering that Claude Laydu’s priest endures is obviously analogous to that of Christ’s, and it’s in this solitude of suffering that the priest finds the transcendent reality of grace. Casting his spiritual journey and spiritual epiphanies in the modern world invites the questions: is he truly in the presence of God, or are these the effects…