Pickpocket

Pickpocket – Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket like Some Like It Hot was also released in 1959. It is seductive to say that Bresson’s movie is as remote from Some Like It Hot as can be imagined. But this isn’t true. In fact, Bresson’s film is crisply shot and smoothly edited, in many instances for maximum suspense – the film looks like a Hollywood film noir which is, probably, the dominant influence on the French director. (Although scenes quote Dostoevsky, the movie seems more authentic when it reprises sequences from Sam Fuller’s lurid potboiler Pickup on South Street (1953).) I have argued that the motivation of Jack Lemmon in the romance with the playboy millionaire acted by Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot, is very mysterious; similarly, the motivations of the titular pickpocket, Michel, remain completely obscure, are never explored in any psychological detail, and remain deeply puzzling. Michel’s mother is dying and, for some reason, he has concluded that picking pockets is evidence that his will transcends conventional morality and proves him to be some sort Uebermensch. Like Some Like It Hot, there is a powerful, even disturbing, sexual subtext – Michel seems to get a rapturous sexual charge out of his criminal adventures. We see him edging toward other men, eyeing them with lustful intensity, and, then, rubbing his body against them on the subway, delicately groping for their wallets – sometimes, Michel’s victims look back at him, as if they were hoping that the consummation of all this contact would be sex and not theft. In many respects, the film is most convincing as a portrait of sexual perversion. Bresson makes it clear that Michel’s motivation is not money. We see him discard a wallet without even looking for the cash contained in it – instead, he removes a picture of a child as a souvenir. The sexual charge that Michel seems to experience committing these crimes is linked to sequences in which he practices theft, training this long fingers to be dexterous and supple in reaching into clothing, rehearsing various methods to drop a wallet from inside a coat, for instance, and catch it with another hand before it falls to the floor. As in samurai pictures which show the heroes obsessively perfecting their craft with endless balletic practice duels, we see Michel continuously honing his skills, these shots staged in loving montages. Compared to Bresson’s later films, Pickpocket is quite conventional in its mise-en-scene – critics impute to Bresson radical strategies of withholding information and elliptical narration that really aren’t all that evident in this film. It is far less radical than Au Hasard Balthazar or Lancelot du Lac or, of course, L’Argent. I don’t rate the picture as highly as Bresson’s late work. In my view, the film is transitional; Bresson is feeling his way toward a new way of making movies. Furthermore, the famous ending – redemption by love – was more effectively staged by Paul Schrader in American Gigolo; for me, at least, my memories of Schrader’s staging of that sequence in his film, eclipse the rather wan and pallid manner in which Bresson ends his film. This is unfair to Bresson since much of the power of Schrader’s final shots in his film derived from their hommage to Pickpocket. Ultimately, I think Pickpocket has more of a situation than a plot; Bresson’s fantastically efficient style doesn’t have anywhere to go with the rather slender material from which the film is constructed – accordingly, although the movie is only 75 minutes, it seems much too long. In later films, Bresson offset his tremendously swift, uncommunicative style by episodic plots of great, even majestic, complexity (Argent demonstrates this), filling his pictures to overflowing without any sense of merely marking time – here the middle of the film doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this picture since many regard it as a life-changing work of transcendental importance. -- I have now watched Pickpocket again, listened to the commentary on the Criterion disc, and also viewed some supplementary documentary material. When I wrote the note above, I was exhausted after a long drive and worried about health and family problems. When we go to the movies or theater, we are choosing a film or a play as a destination. When we visit an art museum, we drive and park and, often, enter the museum by climbing steps to a high podium and, then, traversing an impressive entryway – these activities insure that we will invest at least an hour or so of our undivided attention in the objects visible in the museum’s galleries. All too often, we turn on the TV or watch a DVD because we are too bored or tired to read or go for a walk. As a result, sometimes, we fail to watch with sufficient interest and care. I think this was true with respect to my preliminary screening of Pickpocket. On second and third viewings, the film seems much more powerful and carefully reasoned visually than I had first thought. Patterns of light and darkness, in particular, are highly significant and subtle – a light switch in the hero’s squalid apartment has the force of an emblem of the sacred. At the end, when the hero says in voice-over that Jeanne’s face was suddenly illuminated, we don’t see that illustrated in the image – but this is because, I would argue, that Jeanne’s first appearance at Michel’s apartment involves a subtle, but pervasive, change in the lighting. Her companion remarks that Michel is “in darkness” and switches on the little light bulb over his barren bed – this is the light, I think, that Michel first perceives at the end of the movie. I misconstrued a scene in which I thought Michel removes a photograph from a wallet but discards the money – in fact, he takes a wad of bills from the wallet. Bresson is Catholic but curiously uninterested in the sin of lust – rather, he locates human greed at the center of his metaphysics of guilt and evil. Of course, Michel is driven by a kind of wild, fierce greed – although his interest in money makes currency into a quasi-sexual fetish object. I continue to regard the film as transitional – Bresson is moving from a plot-driven kind of cinema toward a mise-en-scene in which narrative is incidental to other concerns, specifically, it seems, the materialization or embodiment of certain kinds of spiritual malaise in physically concrete events, exchanges of looks and gazes, gestures. The interaction of the police investigator and Michel, clearly derived from Crime and Punishment feels superfluous. The central ballet of thefts in a railway station is remarkably choreographed and eerily repulsive – an extraordinary and hideous spectacle: Michel has become so audacious and skilled that he can extract a wallet from a passing man’s breastpocket, snatch out the money, and replace the emptied wallet in a single fluid gesture. I now admire Bresson’s last several shots much more than I did on first viewing. I now understand that the very clumsiness, the awkward tentativeness of Michel’s attempt to embrace Jeanne through the mesh cage is Bresson’s point – the moment of grace and salvation isn’t beautiful or theatrical; no light suddenly flares from above; instead, Michel tries to push himself through the cage in which he is confined and we see his eye horribly glittering, like the eye of an imprisoned and tortured animal. In American Gigolo, Schrader stages this scene to signify transcendence – the characters are beautiful (after all, Richard Gere is the gigolo) and the images have a soft, rapturous quality, something that I must concede that I found very moving (and probably would still admire); Bresson is much, much tougher – his characters remain resolutely grounded in the abject and squalid circumstances of their guilt.