Week of November 24, 2005, Issue #527
FILM
One hand in your pocket
By JOSEF BRAUN
After a nearly disastrous first attempt, Michel (Martin Lassalle), an unemployed
young Parisian, becomes drawn into the world of pickpocketing. Yet for Michel,
petty theft hardly seems a means of material gain—he lives in a dingy
single room, eats simply if at all, has little in the way of friends or a social
life and each day wears his one nondescript, baggy suit. Rather, pickpocketing
becomes Michel’s vocation in the religious sense of the word, a means
to confirm his rightful sense of place outside of a society he can neither relate
nor conform to, a way of life that facilitates his latent monastic tendencies,
and an art where risk itself is intertwined with devotion. Straddling extremes
of self-awareness and self-deception, his is a world where the gaps between
crimes and consequences are filled with labyrinthine moral abstractions.
Pickpocket (1959), directed by Robert Bresson (arguably
one of Europe’s most important and under-represented filmmakers of his
time), is one strangely seductive film: although it’s a first-person account,
structured around the protagonist’s own memoir which is being written
as the film progresses, the film’s tone is exceedingly detached and Lassalle’s
performance, while intriguing and utterly genuine, is deliberately opaque, his
face often hauntingly blank. There’s a balletic, even erotic, sensuality
to all the rehearsals and acts of thievery, with Lassalle’s long, elegant
fingers stretching and slipping into pockets and purses as he presses dangerously
close to his victims in public spaces, but the visual pleasure found in Michel’s
new trade is offset by a gliding filmic rhythm, a hypnotic series of dissolves
and the use of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s lulling music. Michel tells us from
the start what the story being told is not (i.e. a thriller), and it’s
only after seeing Pickpocket that we can begin to determine what kind of film
it is—something decidedly different than most other films you’ll
see.
The third in his quartet of prison films and probably, to this day, his most
enduring work, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket is certainly emblematic of
the writer-director’s ardent search for truthfully rendered, subversive
paths toward some form of religious grace, a rigorously austere narrative vision
that ultimately, perhaps through its very deprivation of typical movie sensationalism,
casts a divine light upon its subject and the physical world he inhabits. It’s
this distinctive, potentially difficult aspect of Bresson’s unusual body
of work that Paul Schrader, Bresson’s most devout (and unlikely) apprentice,
refers to as “transcendental style.” So affected was Schrader by
the finale of Pickpocket that he echoed it explicitly in the endings of his
own films American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1991).
Anyone who’s read L’Etranger, however, will more likely find an
unmistakable kinship between Pickpocket and Albert Camus’s definitive
existentialist novel: both works, besides sharing period and nationality, are
linked by an anti-social protagonist unable to empathize with others, most notably
their own dead or dying mothers. There are also direct echoes of Pickpocket
and other Bresson films in the work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose L’Enfant
(recently screened at the Edmonton International Film Festival) goes as far
as mirroring Pickpocket’s exact trajectory in the building up and breaking
down of a doomed protagonist, until only complete confinement and the stripping
away of freedom (a realization of the true nature of existence?) bring about
transcendence.
Rather than show these different pieces as derivative of one and other, noting
other works that follow artistic paths similar to Bresson’s makes it easier
to understand what Bresson was after. Unlike, say, Pasolini, understanding Bresson’s
own personal religious or political sensibilities doesn’t seem all that
important to first-time audiences. It may suffice to think of all the conditions
of his cinema as intrinsic to a single spiritual goal, a desire to illuminate
and dignify the human condition in the sparest of contexts and begin a dialogue
about faith and communion in a way that only cinema can propose. In that sense,
his movies still seem ahead of their time. V
Pickpocket
Written and directed by Robert Bresson • Starring Martin Lassalle,
Marika Green and Pierre Leymarie • Metro Cinema • Fri-Mon, Nov 25-28
(7 pm) • 425-9212