Pickpocket

A remarkable film even though the ending is anti-climactic. An amateur pickpocket gets lucky and meets Kassagi, the real-life pickpocket who served as the film's technical consultant. The most amazing scene is the one where three pickpockets rob one passenger after another on a train, taking wallets, passing them off to each other, then emptying and dumping them (or in one case, neatly replacing the lightened wallet in a man's pocket!). The light-finger techniques seem more or less authentic, although I imagine the director's script might have called for inauthentic bits of business. (No, I am not a pickpocket; I was a mark once, and they really messed up my life for a couple of days, but I have been fascinated ever since.)

The pickpockets in this movie follow the European style of stealing men's wallets practically face-to-face. (American pickpockets traditionally prefer to steal from behind to avoid any chance of a mark seeing their faces. When I was taken, I never saw, heard or felt anything.)

LaSalle as Michel is deadpan, but that seems to be part of his character. Now and again, he bubbles a little with suppressed feeling, mostly anger. His passion for Jeanne (Marika Green) is so completely submerged that it does not come out until the end. (If you think I'm spoiling anything, you will want to skip the on screen legend that opens the film because it gives away even more.) As a love story, this does not work. I get it, though: Something happened before the film begins that makes Michel extremely ashamed. He can't be with his mother or anyone he cares about because of his guilt.

Probably the most influential of Robert Bresson's trio of masterpieces from the Fifties (the other two being *A Man Escaped* and, of course, *Diary of a Country Priest*). *Pickpocket* sowed its seeds of influence in the minds of any number of film artists -- Jean-Pierre Melville most notably (who despised Bresson, apparently), whose *Le Samourai* was a mighty struggle against this film . . . and, most completely, writer-director Paul Schrader, who, you'll recall, wrote the *Taxi Driver* screenplay, which was another story about a loner on the outside of societal norms. And it goes without saying that Schrader's *American Gigolo*, which he also directed, is a virtual rewrite of *Pickpocket*, right down to the egregiously plagiarized finale.

The subject of Bresson's film is not nearly as sexy a conception as Schrader's gigolo, though the milieu is equally as sleazy. Instead of preening Richard Gere, we get acting novice Martin LaSalle as the Pickpocket, who wears one suit through the entire film. (Schrader obviously thought he was being clever by giving Gere a large closet stuffed with designer suits). LaSalle lives in a crumbly walk-up flat in Paris, where his books gather dust and the baseboards hide his humble stash of francs and the occasional wristwatch. He has few friends and is too ashamed to visit his dying mother (I won't spoil the reason why). The only pleasure he derives is from his compulsive work as a pickpocket, and it is in these scenes that Bresson stuns us with his martinet control of both narrative pacing and camera placement. The director lovingly shows us the subtle skills of the street thief: the creeping hands, the split-second scams (such as lifting a wallet from a man's suit breast-pocket while standing next to him and pretending to read a newspaper), the choreographed celerity of movement when the thief works with his partners in crime. There's one sequence that follows LaSalle and his two accomplices from a train station all the way to the train, in which they lift about 15 wallets and the occasional purse. The camera-work and editing here is nothing less than sheer mastery -- a ballet of thievery. And let it also be said that Bresson is no slouch when it comes to suspense. It's an intimate and sweaty suspense: will LaSalle's fingers, as they slowly reach into a purse, be noticed?

As might be expected from a French director of the period, there's also plenty of philosophizing to be found here, and in this case, the philosophy is actually pretty interesting. The movie takes as its intellectual parents the ubermensch riff by Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment". LaSalle asks the cop who's on his trail if society's "supermen", even if they choose to be thieves, should not only be let alone, but even respected as an overall benefit to society. (Thus sprach Kenneth Lay!) Obviously, we can mull that over ourselves, but in the meantime, Bresson is not particularly impressed with the "decent" elements of society. The cop is a pompous blow-hard who can offer LaSalle no alternative to his criminality. Bresson is more or less saying that modern society is contemptible: your acceptance of that thesis, and the importance you place on the occasional 100 francs getting lifted from an overfed bourgeois, will ultimately determine your acceptance of this film.

But perhaps its style will bog you down. As per usual, Bresson breaks virtually every rule of the movies. The use of non-actors in the main roles engenders both assets and liabilities: while the avoidance of the typical actors' nonsense is a definite asset, the liabilities occur when Bresson asks his "interpreters" to finally, well, act. There are a few scenes here where the incompetence of LaSalle (he eventually became a fine actor, but he was virtually plucked off the street by Bresson in 1958) will make you cringe, especially when LaSalle is supposed to be angry with someone. There IS something to be said for professionals -- even professional actors. And if none of this puts you off, perhaps Bresson's perverse narrative style -- including scenes in which a character writes down on a piece of paper the following narrative action, to be followed by the character READING what he has just written down, and climaxed by the character DOING just what he wrote and said he was going to do -- will make you scratch your head and mutter something about the arty pretensions of French directors.

And your comments would certainly be justified in Bresson's later productions. But in *Pickpocket*, I feel, the narrative precision, lack of bloat (the movie is 75 minutes long), and broader philosophical questions coalesce into a stringent masterpiece that must finally win your respect. Besides: you gotta love a movie about a pickpocket who never bothers to lock, or even close, his own front door. See? Bresson can even be funny.

8 stars out of 10.

To my previous comments, I should like to add/correct. When I said that Kassagi, who plays "first accomplice" (1er complice), was a 'real-life pickpocket who served as the film's technical consultant' I was not only inaccurate, but the fact that Kassagi was actually a stage magician has some bearing on the film itself, for although the scene in which the pickpockets rip off a series of train passengers is authentic in that it shows how pickpockets operate in terms of teamwork and speed, nevertheless, the moment when Kassagi (?) 'neatly replac[es] the lightened wallet [back] in a man's pocket' is not something a real pickpocket would likely do; it is, however, exactly what a stage magician would do. A real pickpocket has no audience (or so he hopes) whereas a magician wants the audience to see him make a monkey of the hapless "volunteer from the audience." In this case, Kassagi's idea (as I am sure it was) provides a brief moment of comic relief in the middle of a movie that is otherwise without a lot of humor. It is a welcome touch and Bresson was wise to keep it in. Now, I also engaged in a fallacy when I said that 'American pickpockets traditionally prefer to steal from behind to avoid any chance of a mark seeing their faces.' In reality, American pickpockets take from behind because of necessity: even by 1959 when 'Pickpocket" was released, American men more and more carried their wallets in the hip pocket whereas European men, as can be seen in this film, continued to use the inside breast pocket. While the business about seeing the mark's face is part of the lore of American petty criminals, it is not the cause of the American style of picking pockets, but rather a rationalization after the fact.

In Paris, the lonely and anguished pickpocket Michel (Martin La Salle) lives in a dirty little room and spends his time stealing wallets and purses in public spaces. His only friends are Jacques (Pierre Leymarie), who tries to help him to find a job, and his mother's next door neighbor Jeanne (Marika Green). After the death of his mother, Michel teams-up with two smalltime thieves despite the permanent surveillance of the local police inspector (Jean Pélégri). Later he travels overseas to get rid of the observation of the police, but two years later he returns to Paris and finds Jeanne alone, with her son with Jacques after a brief love affair. Michel decides to help her and find an honest job; but in a horse race, he is tempted by his addiction with tragic consequences.

This is the first time that I have watched"Pickpocket" and I expected much more from this famous movie. The development of the lead character Michel is confused and it is clear that he is a troubled, lonely and anguished unemployed young man, but it is never clear the motives why he is addicted in stealing since he shows no ambition or dream or love. The beauty of Marika Green is impressive and she seems to love Michel since the very beginning but again her feelings are never clear. Indeed the actors and actress express no sentiments and the plot is very weird. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Pickpocket"

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket has many great moments, even as it didn't quite do it for me on a first viewing as a 'masterpiece'(some have said to see it twice, perhaps I will). Bresson's use of the camera is often intoxicating in the most subdued, subtle, in-direct distinctions; at times it does take on the prowess of literature. But my only minor nitpick with the film is that it leaves a sort of cold viewing on a viewer, with such simplicity and emotions stripped from the character(s) that it's hard to connect. And yet, this is really made up tenfold with the sort of style that can be likely called Bressonian; straightforward angles, tense medium close-ups, serene editing, and little to no music.

Whatever it sets up for this actor to do, it sets up well. Indeed, the actor who plays the protagonist here is actually very good, aside from the disconnection, and provides an excellent way for us to get along his side. He is a decent person, but there are certain things that get to him, which is why he feels he must steal. At times I almost had a grin as he made some successful grabs, by himself or his cohorts. Was I rooting for him, or just pleased by the pay-off of Bresson's suspense? Maybe both; there is definitely one truly virtuoso sequence in the film, when the pickpockets go on the train.

Like A Man Escaped, there is that sort of dissection, quietly and without really digging too deep, into what a man wants with his life, or doesn't want. While the hero has only one determination in Man Escaped, to get out, Pickpocket has a man who doesn't know what to do with himself, only coming to a genuine catharsis behind bars. I think I like Pickpocket a little more, but I may like it even more on another viewing.