![]() ![]() He leaves the racetrack confident he was not caught when he's suddenly arrested. Michel (Martin LaSalle) goes to a horse race and steals some money from a spectator. The lenient Police Officer (left) along with Michael and his friend Rather, it is a powerful, profound search for meaning and spiritual enlightenment by a man who believes in nothing but himself. Pickpocket is no thriller, though Bresson offers impressive, meticulously detailed scenes of daring and intimate robberies (one sequence on a subway feels like homage to Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street). To put it in a biblical phrase that Bresson would probably like, his heart of stone gets replaced with one of flesh.īresson's direction of his "models" (as he calls his nonprofessional performers) strips them of affectation and motivation, making them blank slates defined by the accumulation of precisely drilled actions and words. He becomes a pickpocket, eventually throws his hand in with a gang, and is finally caught and thrown into jail where, with the help of a young woman's love, he realizes that he neither has nor wants the stuff to be an ubermensch. Like Raskolnikov, although without the Russian character's horrible transgression, he begins to live outside the law. He is an ubermensch, above the norms of morality and society. A young intellectual convinces himself that he wants neither human attachments nor conventional lifestyle. Robert Bresson drew inspiration from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for this examination of an arrogant young pickpocket who deems himself above the laws and conditions of ordinary men. It's easy to sense the fascination and perhaps even the admiration of the director as he choreographs the movements of two and later three pickpockets working together on Paris trains and at a racetrack. Robert Bresson uses in this one the intensely physical to explore the deeply philosophical.ĭepicted with an almost clinical attention to detail, the pickpocketing sequences are amazing and beautiful. " Pickpocket," like so many of Bresson's films, is a combination of visual story-telling and narrative overlay and is certainly his finest and most accessible film. What I can say is that, by the end of the film, my soul was raised.Director: Robert Bresson / France/French/75 mts Yet, the distancing effect finally turns into a kind of spiritual affect-you need to experience it for yourself as it defies description. We don’t quite connect with the characters neither do they allow us to invest a lot of ourselves emotionally. Some critics have even pointed out that pickpocketing is an act of molestation leading to rape-in this case, the rape of the bourgeoisie by the strugglers of society.īresson largely keeps the film grounded. There are some scenes with superb pickpocketing choreography, a devious art elevated by clever editing and blocking, to the point that they seem artificial and allude to a pickpocketer’s fantasy. It can test your patience, and a lot of things are implied, but the rewards are mammoth. Our interest comes largely from the fascination of seeing how a master director philosophizes a pickpocket and his existence. Moreover, Bresson doesn’t give us any semblance of a story hook. “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a path I had to take.” There are no exaggerations of feelings and emotions are stifled-there is no performance to behold, except to absorb the mundane. Inspired by Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, Pickpocket eschews the conventions of narrative filmmaking with Bresson demanding that the nonprofessional cast avoid acting, and instead, embrace being. ![]() But under Bresson’s sleigh-of-hand, an intentionally awkward and meandering work pulls off one of cinema’s most unforgettable endings-a burst of emotion when there was none before, a radiant sense of hope and redemption when everything seemed bleak and preposterous. The plot is simple: a young man with an ailing mother tries to make ends meet through pickpocketing. A bare, stripped-down form of cinema that invites consternation and adulation in equal measure, Pickpocket is one of Bresson’s most valuable experiments. Pickpocket, his fifth feature after Diary of a Country Priest(1951) and A Man Escaped(1956), runs at a paltry 75 minutes, but is economical for good reason-any longer and it might just run out of steam. His body of work is incredible and inspiring for any filmmaker or cinephile to uncover. Often regarded as one of the most ‘Christian’ of filmmakers, Robert Bresson was also one of cinema’s greatest philosophers and existentialists, in the league of Tarkovsky, Bergman and Dreyer. Subject Matter: Moderate – Pickpocketing Crime & Morality ![]()
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