Pickpocket

In Paris, the lonely and anguished pickpocket Michel (Martin La Salle) lives in a dirty little room and spends his time stealing wallets and purses in public spaces. His only friends are Jacques (Pierre Leymarie), who tries to help him to find a job, and his mother's next door neighbor Jeanne (Marika Green). After the death of his mother, Michel teams-up with two smalltime thieves despite the permanent surveillance of the local police inspector (Jean Pélégri). Later he travels overseas to get rid of the observation of the police, but two years later he returns to Paris and finds Jeanne alone, with her son with Jacques after a brief love affair. Michel decides to help her and find an honest job; but in a horse race, he is tempted by his addiction with tragic consequences.

This is the first time that I have watched"Pickpocket" and I expected much more from this famous movie. The development of the lead character Michel is confused and it is clear that he is a troubled, lonely and anguished unemployed young man, but it is never clear the motives why he is addicted in stealing since he shows no ambition or dream or love. The beauty of Marika Green is impressive and she seems to love Michel since the very beginning but again her feelings are never clear. Indeed the actors and actress express no sentiments and the plot is very weird. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Pickpocket"

A remarkable film even though the ending is anti-climactic. An amateur pickpocket gets lucky and meets Kassagi, the real-life pickpocket who served as the film's technical consultant. The most amazing scene is the one where three pickpockets rob one passenger after another on a train, taking wallets, passing them off to each other, then emptying and dumping them (or in one case, neatly replacing the lightened wallet in a man's pocket!). The light-finger techniques seem more or less authentic, although I imagine the director's script might have called for inauthentic bits of business. (No, I am not a pickpocket; I was a mark once, and they really messed up my life for a couple of days, but I have been fascinated ever since.)

The pickpockets in this movie follow the European style of stealing men's wallets practically face-to-face. (American pickpockets traditionally prefer to steal from behind to avoid any chance of a mark seeing their faces. When I was taken, I never saw, heard or felt anything.)

LaSalle as Michel is deadpan, but that seems to be part of his character. Now and again, he bubbles a little with suppressed feeling, mostly anger. His passion for Jeanne (Marika Green) is so completely submerged that it does not come out until the end. (If you think I'm spoiling anything, you will want to skip the on screen legend that opens the film because it gives away even more.) As a love story, this does not work. I get it, though: Something happened before the film begins that makes Michel extremely ashamed. He can't be with his mother or anyone he cares about because of his guilt.

Pickpocket is a film that apparently has serious flaws- from the very beginning it displays little to no emotion as the actors on screen just say their lines and the camera just follows them from a distance, with no close-ups or any other tricks.

But what is unique about this film is that this very criticism is actually a deliberate attempt to cause uneasiness in the viewer. And it succeeds- the anxiety, as felt by the pickpocket in his everyday living, is also transmitted to us. So, to correct my previous statement: this movie does not lack emotions- it has emotions: anxiety, uncertainty, but these are delivered in an unconventional manner.

From a personal standpoint, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. It is hard to appreciate this dimension of the film at first. But after seeing some extras from the excellent Criterion package, I was able to understand better. How Bresson actually committed to cause these emotions in the viewer, how he re-shot several times various scenes until the actors just repeated their lines, until no trait of emotions were left. Michel's narration voice-over is flat, plain. These were non-professional actors set to work in a non-standard way, Bresson's way. And the result is this: a film somewhat off-putting, but still a great work of art.

More interesting than any individual film, it's Bresson's philosophy that I feel is worth examining. He's all about striving, the question is what for? If it's purity, as most would agree, and purity always seems like something to aspire to, is it a purity that we can take as a base for living?

I don't think I will have conclusions before Balthazar, perhaps his most famous. Already, since Diary of a Priest, I can see him moving in a direction, growing that philosophy. Even more sparse, even more laconic, removes flourish and leaves bare floors so that we endure something being revealed in the pacing. That's fine. More revealing is another trajectory being delineated, human- based.

It's once more about a lone youth who struggles with a life that suffocates. In Diary he was a pious young priest who wanted absolute sincerity in the face of life; but people were complicated beings, the journey caused spiritual torment, questions of angst abounded. In Man Escaped the same youth becomes a prisoner, also endures a life of anguish, but now endures quietly, without torment and piety. It was Bresson peeling away the romanticizing of suffering of Diary, what was left was simply the work of breaking free from that prison- world, stoicism in place of romanticism.

So what does he do in this next one? The same youth once more, but now he's not bound by duty to truth or has any work set out before him. Now he's free to wander the world which the man in Escaped had struggled to break free to. Without an intellectual or other struggle before him, he's simply awash with time. He's stifled by the freedom, he has no place. He perceives himself as a man of lofty talents, possibly a genius, but wastes these talents in being a pickpocket around town who won't even go see his dying mother. He always comes and goes from his tiny apartment to no real purpose.

Observant viewers will note the equation of pickpocketing as presented in the film, an elaborately precise choreography of hands and motions, with Bresson's own filmmaking. Film lore touts him as pure and simple as if that simplicity is conquered without effort, in truth he's all about the meticulous timing and moving of exact pieces. His favorite tool is exactly this game of hide and show that controls what we see; for example a scene like in Man Escaped where the new cellmate is introduced off-camera, we don't know who our man is talking to until we turn to see. He does it here too, often by having characters turn and leave, questions hanging, creating gap and resonance. He's the opposite of natural.

Back to the conundrum expressed at the beginning however; if this is pure, what does it strive purely for?

The only answer I get here is that we no longer have a man who is trying to understand life, or someone who works towards an end, these selves have been shed. Now we have someone who endures, but has no idea exactly what or what for. It's Bresson inching towards the same cessation that he strives for visually. What stands before him now is what he sketches in the opening intertitle; something pushes the man from the inside.

He bangles this all up at the end, and I believe that looking back he would probably have been unsatisfied himself. He reverts back to his romanticism where the tormented young man has love reserved for him, but a wistful love that doesn't feel earned, there's simply nothing that rings true about her infatuation with him. This is Eva Green's aunt by the by.

So this has done its job, shed one self and one set of conundrums and replaced them with another. Onwards to his next, which looks like another draft of the same philosophy, and then Balthazar is around the corner. I already believe I disagree with Schrader.

This slow burn film from Robert Bresson is not going to be to everyone's taste, and I'm not sure it was to mine. It's a film I admired more than enjoyed.

It tells the story of a man who's addicted to theft, or maybe more accurately addicted to the rush of getting away with theft, or maybe more accurately addicted to the rush of possibly being caught thieving. It's not a long movie but it may try your patience, as it's very slow and very quiet. The main character is a bit of a blank slate, and he remains so. We never learn much about him, and I personally didn't feel especially invested in what happened to him. It was only in reading about the film after seeing it that I found out the ending is considered to be remarkable among film scholars, but I didn't react to it much myself.

The best scenes in the movie are those that show the elaborate rituals that exist among pickpocket teams, and the pretty amazing feats they pull off. They're like magicians who use sleight of hand for nefarious purposes.

Grade: B+