Stolen Moments
French director Robert Bresson stripped away everything except what really mattered
by Jim Ridley
“This film is not in the style of a thriller,” Robert Bresson’s 1959 film Pickpocket cautions in the very first frame. It’s as much a statement of principle as fact. A thriller depends on an audience’s willingness to be manipulated. Watching a movie like Hitchcock’s Marnie, about a thief who robs as a kind of sexual retribution, I’m essentially entering into a contract with the director—give me that tingle of dread and suspicion and imminent capture, and do whatever you will to get me there.
It would be stupid to say that thrillers are inherently inferior to what Bresson does—especially Hitchcock’s, which toy with a viewer’s responses to complicate and examine them. But as someone who loves life and movies alike, nothing dulls my senses as much as the clunky emotional and narrative manipulation that infests filmmaking. Pickpocket, by contrast, acts as a whetstone: a drama of crime and punishment that doesn’t demand love or sympathy for its characters, yet allows them and us to feel our way toward grace.
Robert Bresson’s movies were known mostly by reputation here until the Cinematheque Ontario undertook a remarkable retrospective that toured North America seven years ago. Not only did it allow the filmmaker to see his work embraced by a wide new audience just before his death, in 1999, it rebutted the standard yap that his movies were the embodiment of artsy pretension. Along with 1956’s A Man Escaped, a prisoner-of-war movie that conveys both the torment of confinement and the exhilaration of escape, Pickpocket is the most accessible film in his developed style.
And yet if you’ve never seen his movies before, it still may seem like sensory deprivation compared to the usual megaplex thunder: actors whose changes of expression register like ripples on concrete, scenes that deliberately omit what we’re accustomed to expecting as dramatic climaxes. As Pickpocket makes clear, though, his movies aren’t pretentious, just tough. Bresson’s study of a compulsive, spiritually benumbed pickpocket (Martin LaSalle) may not have the trumped-up machinery of a mystery plot, but it exerts the tension of unwavering scrutiny. Every shot of this 75-minute movie seems to have been pared to its essence of gesture, detail and significance. It seems slow because everything matters.
In a sense, Pickpocket is about the debasement of touch. The emphasis is on hands disconnected from their owners—hands, and money. The first shot is of a hand scrawling in a journal; the second, of a hand removing bills from a purse to place bets at a racetrack. The movie’s centerpiece, a marvel of film choreography, is a montage of swift fingers relieving various owners of their wallets and billfolds at a train station—a thief’s-eye view of humanity as a sea of yawning pockets.
This is thriller material—the pocket-picking scenes even resemble Samuel Fuller’s bang-up pulper Pickup on South Street—but Bresson deliberately takes suspense out of the equation. The opening crawl says that the pickpocket hero Michel will follow a strange path to connect with another soul: that person turns out to be Jeanne (Marika Green), a neighbor who worries over his isolation and rumors of criminal mischief. The hero’s capture is no more a surprise than his eventual redemption. But by removing plot concerns of will-he-or-won’t-he, the movie sustains its unwavering focus on the pickpocket’s state of being: his soulsickness.
Bresson accomplishes more with less, without making a fuss of his minimalism, than any other director. Sometimes it’s simply clearing out dead wood: ruthlessly omitting establishing shots, say, or letting the turn of Michel’s head and some traffic noises suggest a cab coming down a city street. More often it’s the power of a detail that offers a window into the soul—Michel’s dismissive flicking-away of an emptied wallet, as if to show its contents can’t provide what he’s missing. The danger, for viewers who connect with the spare force of Bresson’s filmmaking, is discovering how often lesser movies resemble that wallet.
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