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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Pickpocket (1959)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Pickpocket is the archetypal Bresson film and the film most often pointed to as his masterpiece. (Paul Schrader has often cited it as the inspiration for his Taxi Driver script.) Filmed in a deceptively simple and economic style, the film has a purity of execution that is rare: there is not one scene here that does not directly address the spiritual downward spiral and subsequent redemption. In fact, Bresson tells his story in a scant 75 minutes. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and with more than a few echoes of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Pickpocket’s Raskolnikov is a sad, jobless man named Michel (played by Martin LaSalle), who has turned to stealing money out of women’s purses at a race track. He is caught by the police, but when their evidence isn’t enough to hold him, he is released. Along with his best pal Jacques (Pierre Leymarie), Michel goes to a local pub where he strikes up conversations with the off duty police inspector (Jean Pelegri) who detained him. He tells the inspector of his "social theories" — namely that there are clever men, thieves perhaps, who by the superiority of their cleverness, ought to be above the law as they are potentially more beneficial outside of prison. The inspector, of course, keeps an eye on Michel. |
Pickpocket |
Acutely sensitive to the twists of fate, Michel then sees a professional pickpocket effortlessly nick a woman’s purse on the Metro, and he becomes obsessed with the idea of thievery as not only a vocation but as an art. The more obsessed he becomes, the more he ignores the people around him, namely the pretty neighbor of his ailing mother, Jeanne (Marika Green). While Michel’s indifference to her drives her into the arms of Jacques, Michel gets deeper and deeper into his craft, making friends with a master thief and his assistant, who school Michel in the myriad tricks of the trade. Soon Michel is a pro himself.
Michel continues to confront the inspector, as if daring the inspector to catch him, going as far as to bring a book on the art of thievery to the inspector at his office. But Michel realizes that it can't last, and soon the master and his assistant are caught on the Metro. The inspector comes to see Michel in his hovel and tells Michel that he has been watched even before his first arrest at the racetrack. He had been a suspect when his mother’s neighbor — Jeanne, before she knew Michel — complained to the police that his mother was having her money stolen. Michel, the inspector tells him, has always been suspected of stealing his own mother’s money. Michel later confesses to Jeanne that it was indeed he, that he needed the money, but Jeanne is horrified that he could have done that.
Michel takes the money he has stolen and goes to live and hide (and gamble) in Italy and England, returning to his home two years later to find Jeanne with a child by Jacques, who has subsequently left her. Michel vows to become Jeanne’s salvation by getting a legitimate job and providing for her. Things seem to be going well until he cannot resist the urge to pick one more pocket, although his sense of fate tells him he is picking the wrong pocket.
Fascinating from start to finish, Pickpocket so expertly immerses you in the life of its sad protagonist that one could very be well watching a documentary. Here, as in his other films, Bresson films the world in medium close-up, from the shoulders to the knees, a world of arms and hands acting without heads. The montages here of the pickpockets practicing their art are brilliant and memorable, comprised of quick cuts that mirror the nimble gestures of the thieves. Bresson’s genius was to find poetry in the squalor of petty crime, to find a protagonist on the Paris Metro whose spiritual turmoil was no less consuming as the men described by Dostoyevsky. For anyone serious about cinema as an art form, Pickpocket, over 40 years after its release, remains essential viewing.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.