Bresson was in his 80s when he completed his last film, L’Argent, which has been compared to Salo, another brutal and despairing final work. Adapting a Tolstoy novella, Bresson depicts the descent into crime and brutishness of a young man, from a seemingly ordinary bourgeois family, when he tries to pass a counterfeit note. Concerned with the corrosive effects of an all-pervasive materialism (as in Une femme douce), Bresson returns to the prison as the primary setting, making clear that it is not just the location of the mortification of the body but is also a ruling metaphor for the modern world, which has itself become a prison for the soul, leading to the cruelest and basest human behavior. – DP