Robert Bresson (1959)

In The Films of Robert Bresson (1969), Daniel Millar writes that ‘A filmgoer who still finds [Pickpocket] unrewarding at second or third viewing may happen to enjoy some of Bresson’s other films – but it will probably not be for their specifically Bressonian virtues’.  That’s me, I’m afraid.  This is the fifth Bresson I’ve seen.  Of the four others, I can’t cope with Au hasard Balthazar (1966), despite its exalted reputation, but think well of (Millar’s ‘enjoyed’ is an odd choice of verb) Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956) and, most recently, L’argent (1983), which post-dates Millar’s book.  I don’t get Pickpocket, though.   Despite its brevity (seventy-six minutes), I’m not sure I’ll even return for a second viewing.

Text on the screen at the start announces that Pickpocket is not a thriller.  The BFI audience I was in hadn’t, of course, bought tickets for a Bresson film in anticipation of a crime caper; it’s hard to believe the caveat was needed even in 1959.  Within a few minutes, the protagonist, Michel (Martin LaSalle), has carried out his first theft and been arrested but the police inspector (Jean Pélégri) who then questions him, releases Michel on grounds of insufficient evidence.  It’s not clear what further evidence is needed:  Michel was presumably spotted stealing a wad of notes that he still has on his person but Bresson has no interest in this kind of detail.  Within a few more minutes, Michel, in a bar with his friend Jacques (Pierre Laymarie), has bumped into the inspector, and they’re engaged in a philosophical discussion of whether exceptional individuals have the right to break the law when doing so might enable them to achieve remarkable, beneficial things (no details of those either).

Pickpocket is set in contemporary Paris, where Michel is recruited into a gang of career pickpockets.  They specialise in elaborately co-ordinated thefts in crowds.  These routines, thanks to Raymond Lamy’s editing, are gracefully amusing to watch but subsidiary to Michel and his relationships with the few people in his life who appear to mean something to him – Jacques, Michel’s ailing mother (Dolly Scal) and, especially, Jeanne (Marika Green), another tenant in the house where the mother lives and dies.  Michel has evidently been compared to Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov but he seemed to me a blank.  As usual, Bresson’s cast comprises people who hadn’t previously acted professionally.  Martin LaSalle and Marika Green both hold the camera but as static images.  In L’argent, Bresson often achieves a tension between the undemonstrative playing and the extreme events taking place.  The latter are in short supply in Pickpocket so no such dynamic contrast is possible.  Besides, the line readings here aren’t always determinedly uninflected.  The actors sometimes seem to be trying, but failing, to register emotion.

Michel’s criminal career begins and ends at a racecourse – Longchamp, no less.  Racehorses in films usually have unconvincing names but this isn’t a problem in Pickpocket:  the director’s eschewal of realistic trivia means Bressonian horses don’t have any names at all.  Bresson doesn’t, however, eschew music as he often does – the narrative is regularly punctuated by bursts of Jean-Baptiste Lully.  This has the effect of underlining the importance of what’s on screen, without clarifying its meaning.

24 June 2022