Pickpocket

Pickpocket, the first film that Robert Bresson directed from an original script not based on a previous literary work, is a radically internalized film. Not unlike Bresson's previous film, A Man Escaped (but more audaciously), Pickpocket has a general plot outline and even a few scenes that suggest an action-thriller: an aimless young man in Paris decides to become a pickpocket, evades the police, and collaborates with two other thieves to wreak havoc on unsuspecting Parisians' pocketbooks. (Rumor has it that Bresson was even inspired by Samuel Fuller's pulpy 1953 film Pickup on South Street.) But Bresson uses this concept as a springboard to confront existential despair, to philosophize about the (perhaps fruitless) search for meaning, to expose a character's soul onscreen. This was the first true elaboration of Bresson's austere, "transcendental" style (to use Paul Schrader's description), and it still feels jarringly uncompromising.  

Pickpocket was written over a period of a few months and filmed relatively quickly in some of Paris' busiest districts (a horse racetrack, the Gare de Lyon rail station), resulting in a chaotic shoot and a disorienting style that is integral to the film's dissociative effect, which makes the viewer firmly aware of the split between mind (or soul) and body. At times, unwitting extras on the streets glance at the camera or the actors, while frequent cutaways to close-ups (of hands reaching into pockets, of characters isolated within throngs of people) emphasize the feeling of alienation in modern urban areas. Perhaps more striking is the complex soundtrack: because of the frenetic production, sound was not recorded synchronously, which allows Bresson and his sound designer, Antoine Archimbaud, to craft a hyperintense, not-quite-realistic aural environment. On teeming streets, only a patter of footsteps is heard; amid bustling groups of people, the rustle of fabric as a pocket is picked becomes deafeningly loud. Instead of seeming like a mistake, this disjuncture between sound and image mirrors the displacement of the main character, Michel (played by the Uruguayan first-time actor Martin La Salle). The film is planted firmly within Michel's turbulent mindstate, and the audience identifies intimately with his moral isolation. 

The concise, elliptical narrative is similarly disorienting. We first meet Michel after he's already made the decision to become a pickpocket; although the film is structured as his first-person narration delivered through written journal entries (a clear influence on Paul Schrader, in films like Taxi Driver and First Reformed), he gives us no context as to why he's made this seemingly reckless choice. Other films might give us backstory about Michel's youth or his failure to assimilate into society, but Pickpocket grants us only Michel's voiceover philosophy about how his superiority over humanity (a flock of sheep who do nothing but work and spend money) makes morality irrelevant to him. The pickpocketing scenes themselves seem minimalist on the surface but are incredibly precise, heightening every onscreen movement with an intensity that foreshadows Bresson's later L'Argent (1983), with its fetishized images of money exchanging hands as though it's a religious rite. 

Pickpocket

Grade: A

Runtime: 76m.
Country: France
Premiere: December 16, 1959
US Release: May 21, 1963

Director: Robert Bresson
Producer: Agnès Delahaie
Writer: Robert Bresson
Cinematographer: Léonce-Henri Burel
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Cast: Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri, Dolly Scal, Pierre Leymarie, Kassagi, Pierre Étaix, César Gattegno 

Much of Pickpocket moves with breathtaking rapidity: characters like Michel's mother, her saintly neighbor Jeanne (the character name isn't exactly subtle), and Michel's friend Jacques are introduced abruptly. Michel's trouble with the law is developed in the space of a split-second cut, as we're introduced to a police inspector (Jean Pélégri) who becomes Michel's ideological foil, if not necessarily his nemesis. Late in the narrative, Michel evades capture by the police, spends two years roaming around Europe, blows all of his money on alcohol and women, and returns to Paris to find that Jeanne has had a child with Jacques—but all of these developments are conveyed via voiceover narration, outside of the diegesis. Bresson makes it clear that these elements of the plot, hypothetically the most suspenseful, are less important than sustained moments of observation and introspection, as when we spend minutes on end observing Michel's pickpocketing techniques, or when he discusses a book about the famous 18th-century Irish pickpocket George Barrington. This approach might be called "radical brevity," disarming the audience by emphasizing or de-emphasizing unexpected elements of the plot, and Bresson used it even more memorably in Au hasard Balthazar, which Jean-Luc Godard famously referred to as "the world in an hour and a half." (It might sound familiar to viewers of last year's Cold War​, which hurtled through 15 years of Polish history in about 90 minutes, with a conciseness that seems initially baffling.)  

While countless directors have tried to imitate Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Ozu, et al., still no one has tried to duplicate the maverick style of Bresson, perhaps recognizing that such a style could never be replicated. He was a rigorously astute and philosophical filmmaker—elements of Michel's character provide echoes of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, most obviously the nihilistic Raskolnikov—but he sought to present his ideas through images, edits, sounds, the immediate language of cinema. One of many apparent contradictions in his style was that by foregrounding the plasticity of the figures onscreen—not actors but "models," whose characters were forged from "not what they do, but what they are" (in Bresson's words)—we seem to arrive at a greater understanding of what compels them, precisely because we have to provide the answers ourselves. Looking while seeing, Bresson might have said. For all the voiceover narration about morality and religious belief, Pickpocket ultimately forces us to conjecture about Michel's innermost drives and miseries. It is in this way a supremely cinematic work: it dives into human psychology almost exclusively through sight and sound. ​ 

Bresson has a reputation for austerity, which is fair in some ways; his movies aren't the kind of lavish we might expect. But in Pickpocket at least, his style is absolutely riveting, as exemplified by the scene above. The camera is remarkably mobile, although its slow tracking shots and pans following characters' movements hardly call attention to themselves. The performers' movements, slow and robotic, make their actions simultaneously intense and banal, as though robbing people on trains is no more spectacular than opening a door. The extended duration of such scenes, during which we observe human behavior with rigorous resolve, begs a multitude of questions: are they acting of their own free will or victims of cruel fate? Are we meant to sympathize with or judge their decisions? Are Michel and his fellow pickpockets admirable outsiders resisting the demands of capitalism, or selfish egotists succumbing to the same philosophy of self-preservation?

That last question gets to the heart of what makes Pickpocket so unshakeable to this day. Released only 15 years after the end of World War II, when notions of morality, capitalism, art, and science were radically shaken by the very real presence of human barbarity, Bresson's film grapples (as most of his do, in different ways) with the desperate attempt to find meaning and purpose in a modern life ruled by wealth and power. This was hauntingly allegorized in Au hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, and such existential despair in the face of capitalism is the driving force behind Bresson's stunningly cold final film, L'Argent. But if the confrontation with human nature takes on an anguished tone in Bresson's films, there are moments in which connection and transcendence are possible. Nowhere is that clearer than in the final shot of Pickpocket. Once again, disjuncture rules the day in Bresson's cinema: the rift between body and soul, between hope and despair, between internal thought and external action. The gravitational pull between these dualities are what continue to make Pickpocket​ so transfixing and overpowering.