More crucially, now gone in L’argent is the psychological interiority that marked Bresson heroes like the country priest (Claude Laydu), or Fontaine (François Leterrier) chipping away alone in his cell in A Man Escaped. This is not simply a matter of Bresson progressively abandoning, over the course of his career, the device of a “thought track,” voice-over narration. Something colder and more despairing has occurred: it is not the case that Bresson denies us access to the “inside” of his characters, but rather that there is no longer any “deep” mind, heart, or soul to access. There is only a sometimes unpredictable mix of animal impulses and reactive behaviors, aggressive outbursts and defensive mechanisms.
Yvon, in a sense, “follows the money” all the way to the end, enslaved to its avaricious logic. Yet his ultimate question to his kindly benefactor—“Where’s the money?”—is (as Arnaud points out) almost the rhetorical riddle of a sphinx: it requires no real, practical answer. Yvon goes through the motions of theft and killing, but they are meaningless even to him at this point; there is no desired outcome or goal involved. Survival, revenge, redemption—these motives meant a lot to Tolstoy in his time, but they don’t count for much anymore in the completely dehumanized, alienated, anonymous world that Bresson captures here.
from L'argent: the Weight of the World, by Adrian Martin