Wealth & Money Quote by Alain Resnais

A brutal little line that collapses a whole bureaucracy into five words: if you can’t pay and you can’t prove who you are, you don’t merely have less - you effectively don’t exist. Coming from Alain Resnais, it reads less like personal complaint than like a director’s hard-eyed inventory of what modern states and modern life demand as the price of being legible.

Resnais is a filmmaker obsessed with memory, record, and the gaps between lived experience and the official version of it. In that light, “few documents” isn’t just paperwork; it’s the state’s camera, its archive, its stamp. No papers means no access to housing, work, safety, even movement. “Little money” adds the second lock. Capital and documentation become twin systems of recognition: one buys you time and mobility, the other buys you credibility. Without either, you’re reduced to pure vulnerability, the kind that can’t be appealed because it can’t be logged.

The sentence’s force comes from its flat, declarative grammar. No melodrama, no adjectives, no plea. It mimics administrative language - the clipped tone of a form rejecting a person. That mimicry is the subtext: power doesn’t need to shout; it just needs to file you under “missing.”

Read historically, it shadows 20th-century Europe’s lessons about displacement and control, when identity could hinge on a stamp and survival could hinge on a wallet. Resnais turns that history into a portable modern diagnosis: precarity isn’t only poverty, it’s erasure.