Pickpocket
Interviewer: ?You say always that you're a demon for truth, yet this film is obviously stylized.?
Robert Bresson: ?But style goes very well with truth.?
(From an interview available on the Bresson section of the wonderful Masters of Cinema film resource.)
Due to its classic status, Pickpocket (1959) is habitually misrepresented in the media. Knee-jerk reactions based on earlier accounts predominate the reviews of Bresson?s mid-career masterpiece. Perhaps most film critics are merely too meek to report truthfully what they see, hear and feel. The run-down of clich?s goes something like this: Pickpocket is A) ?austere?, B) ?minimalistic? and 3) ?realistic? (as far as the pickpocketing scenes are concerned).
A) To a considerable degree, Pickpocket is a comedic film. Or, at the very least, this supposedly ?somber? film has a large number of humorous sequences and one-liners. For example, in one scene the protagonist?s ?love interest? asks the pickpocket whether he has ever believed in anything. To which Michel replies: "I believed in God, Jeanne, for three minutes." (The way Martin Lasalle says the line packs the punch.) Oh yes, and the masterful thief naturally perfects his reflexes by playing a pinball machine. These are undeniably comedic touches, and to deny their existence would be to deny art?s capacity to fuse the dark and the light into something more ambiguous.
B) I cannot quite grasp the notion of cinematic minimalism. Since the world is plentiful, the camera and the audio recorder cannot fail to capture an embarrassment of riches. Bresson?s storytelling (especially the use of editing and voiceover narration) succeeds in building multiple layers of meaning. Subsequently, the information level is high, far higher than is the norm. And yet, it all flows smoothly, the narrative unfolding with ease and energy. Let?s make a preposterous statement: the advances in the visual arts of the 20th Century can be summed up with the names Bresson and Balthus. (It might very well be true.)
Towards the end of Pickpocket, Jeanne asks if Michel has thought of escape. His voiceover (throughout the film, he is reading aloud his memoir / novel / notebook about his life as a thief) confirms that the idea (new to Michel at the time) seemed workable, while the man himself utters ?Non. Non.? in rapid succession and exits Jeanne?s apartment. Next, it?s off to Milan, then Rome, and finally to London. Two years pass in under two minutes, and then we see Michel returning to Paris, looking exactly the same as before and wearing exactly the same suit!
C) The extended pickpocketing scenes of Bresson?s film are what cinema was invented for, but one thing they are not is realistic. Many of the moves are executed in plain sight or in such a way that the victim would have at least suspected something. But this does not take anything away from the power of Pickpocket. In fact, the reverse is true: the dexterity and showmanship of the thieves grant the film what Italo Calvino labelled "lightness". Pickpocket is an infinitely rich film, but its richness does not lie in the qualities promoted by most critics. No surprise there, then.
At the moment, we?re experiencing a Robert Bresson DVD renaissance (most of the R2 releases are being handled by Artificial Eye). It?s just a hunch, but I think I?ll remember the summer of 2005 as the summer of Bresson. (Last summer belonged to Jacques Tati. And Roger Federer. And Michel de Montaigne. France-Switzerland 2-1!) I have a particular interest in Lancelot du Lac. Beginning with the knights? failure to find the Grail, the rest of the film basically documents their post-quest bickering and descend into violence and despair. Such a hilarious premise!
A Borgesian digression: Had the Grail been found (had it existed in the first place) soon after the death of Christ, the myth of seeking the Grail would not have been ideated and the history of the human imagination would have lost something valuable. (This could spin into an entire conversation about how the Western mindset is essentially verb-based: the noun (the Grail, the world) is far less important than the verb (to seek, to act in the world).)
