![]() It’s unlikely that Michel steals because he considers himself a “superman,” in a class of hypothetical extraordinary beings whose unusual gifts place them above the law-though he posits such a theory, abstractly, in his sour, unengaging encounters with the police detective played by Jean Pe?le?gri. His fears are more logistical than spiritual, and also function as aphrodisiacs. Michel is like a man who knows he can cop an orgasm if he manages to be in the right place at the right time and rubs up against the right partner. But stealing has a specific psychosexual meaning for him, beyond fulfilling the simple need to eat. Les mise?rables, after all, is about a man implacably hounded by the law for stealing a loaf of bread. Often it is necessary, and its drastic punishment is more wicked than the crime. His decision to tempt exposure and shame on a daily basis is a difficult one, but not because he wonders, terrified like Raskolnikov, whether he’s truly capable of it. They are enlarged to epic scale only by his neurasthenic imagination. His crimes never rise above the level of common, small-time transgression. A man commits forbidden acts, gets caught, and goes to prison, where his suffering is ameliorated by the steadfast love of a good woman.īut Pickpocket’s central character, Michel (played by the Uruguayan nonactor Martin LaSalle), with his watery, feebly asserted version of Raskolnikov’s Nietzscheanism, is merely a petty thief, conspicuously lacking the will to monstrosity of Dostoyevsky’s ax murderer. Some of them were plausible, some undoubtedly true, but many just sounded convincing once art becomes a religion, you can say any high-minded nonsense about it with utter impunity.Īs per standard critical note, Pickpocket is obviously “inspired” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Since I hadn’t absorbed the truisms about Bresson that even then encased his work in a gelatin of spiritually heroic cliche?s, I was, after Pickpocket, skeptical about the thematic platitudes critics and film writers routinely and confidently attached to him. (Even on acid, I was never one to enjoy Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens it was also the first movie I saw on LSD. Has failed to achieve the status of Bresson or Ozu or Dreyer (TAXI DRIVER, his finest achievement, comes closest), he has, at least, brought an interesting philosophical element into American film.Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Elements of TAXI DRIVER's narrative (voiceover and diary passages corresponding) are lifted from PICKPOCKET, as in the final line of AMERICAN GIGOLO. Those familiar with the work of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader will note a few similarities in style and thought, which comesĪs no surprise since Schrader wrote a book entitled Transcendental Style on Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. Separates PICKPOCKET from so many other films is Bresson's use of Lassalle's inner voice (which corresponds to the written words in his diary) as a narrative element. In the memorableįinal moments, Green and Lassalle embrace through the bars of the cell as he tells her, "What a strange way I have traveled to find you at last." As Bresson has so often done in his films, PICKPOCKET details a man's struggle between his inner feelings and his attempt to survive in society. Green visits him in his cell, and for the first time he realizes that he loves her. Again he resorts to stealing and again he is caught. When he returns years later he finds Green unmarried and with a child. When Lassalle's partners in crime are arrested, the pickpocket fleesįrance, leaving behind Green, who has by now fallen in love with him. The police inspector observes Lassalle's criminal life but fails to arrest him, partly because of flimsy evidence and partly because he is intrigued with Lassalle's ideas. Lassalle, however, chooses to return toĬrime, taking lessons from master pickpocket Kassagi. When his sickly mother dies, Green and Leymarie, his two closest friends, offer advice and solace. It is during his arrest that Lassalle's consciousness is raised on the rights and wrongs of theft. Lassalle stars as a lonely young man who resigns himself to the fate of becoming a pickpocket.Īn initial attempt is unsuccessful, and he is easily caught. ![]() Using Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a point of departure, director Bresson has created a wonderful study of a criminal on the road to redemption in PICKPOCKET (released in Paris in 1959).
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