Pickpocket
Psychological Drama • 75 Minutes • France • 16 December 1959
Director: Robert Bresson • Written by: Robert Bresson • Produced by: Agnès Delahaie • Starring: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Laymarie, Jean Pélégri, Henri Kassagi • Cinematography: Léonce-Henri Burel • Edited by: Raymond Lamy
Michel the titular character of Robert Bresson’s snappily downcast Pickpocket is a renegade, a nihilist, one of cinema’s Nietzschean Übermensch and most of all a real churl. He is the surliest of apostates with the hint of a bad boy persona that might suggest Marlon Brando or James Dean in blocking or on the amateur stage, for as is Bresson’s wont the lead Martin LaSalle was a rank novice, and there is little by way of conventional acting across the brief duration of the film.
The films of Bresson and especially Pickpocket harness a kind of austerity which itself transgresses the conventional modes of acting and not just Hollywood but most types of cinema. Like some of the works by Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, the effect can sometimes be ungainly, at once overly solemn and arch yet faintly ridiculous as their philosophical flights of fancy seem to stagger naked and barrel-chested out from the frames of their otherwise slender or minimalist films. Bergman’s chamber play Through a Glass Darkly with its spider god is another example, while affirming in his own eyes a kind of formal and spiritual connection Tarkovsky once wrote ‘I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman’.
There were two primary sources for Pickpocket, the first being Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian opus Crime and Punishment and the character of Raskolnikov, a handsome but destitute former student. Through trials of conscience Raskolnikov would not only steal but commit murder upon the belief that he could make better use of the proceeds while coping admirably with any inner tumult which might arise from the fatal act, in one person blending a rational desire to fund or aid the greater number of people with an inflated sense of his own exceptionalism, viewing himself as a step apart from other men. From his own gaunt handsomeness and pervasive sense of alienation to the lingering presence of a mother – who though alive is mostly a spectre offstage – and the fraught sense of life’s walls closing in, the character of Michel in Pickpocket is modelled closely after Raskolnikov.
Bresson is also believed to have drawn liberally from the American director Samuel Fuller’s noir film Pickup on South Street, which showed at the Venice International Film Festival in 1953 though it was not released until 1961 in French theatres, with the two films sharing beyond their subject matter other relationships and themes.
The idea of an exceptional man or Übermensch – a term which had been strewn and misconstrued by the Nazis, with Nietzsche himself describing Dostoevsky as ‘the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn’ – who by virtue of some combination of talent and breeding may defy the legal and moral conventions which bind other men had been treated before on film, notably via Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart’s psychological thriller Rope which was based on the real-life Leopold and Loeb case. That film like Crime and Punishment revolved around murder, whereas Bresson limits his character’s misdeeds to petty theft, a strange gambit for this kind of philosophical matter which inevitably lowers the stakes.
Pickpocket is instead a more restrained or even bland take on urban alienation and a man at odds with the priorities of the age. The crime itself is used to demarcate or symbolise this alienation and for the sake of some elaborate choreography, with the psychology of pickpocketing, the impact the practice has on its victims and even the nuances of the art regarded with scant detail. The acting is virtually nonexistent, as the principal cast – LaSalle as Michel, the Swedish-French actress Marika Green as Jeanne, who is introduced as a neighbour of Michel’s mother with a key to her place, and Pierre Laymarie as Michel’s enduring friend Jacques – merely recite their lines with barely a trace of feeling.
The effect is especially pronounced in those encounters between just Michel and Jacques. We understand Jeanne as a romantic interest from the first moment, but the relationship between Michel and Jacques hardly needs to exist and seems to deliberately hang by a thread, as the scenes between them possess less chemistry or personableness than we might find between any two strangers who bump into one another out on the street.
An author and professor by trade, Jean Pélégri as the police chief is stronger or at least a more assuring presence on screen, as is Henri Kassagi who plays Michel’s pickpocketing accomplice. In fact Kassagi, who apparently honed his talents on the streets of Tunis before moving to Paris, was himself a pickpocket hired by Bresson as a technical advisor to the film. A degree of subsequent notoriety forced him to abandon pickpocketing and he became a stage magician, but in Pickpocket he is just as memorable as any of the main cast with his furtive manner and impish poker face.
Perhaps Kassagi was never a pickpocket and was taking Bresson for a ride, as the examples of pickpocketing in the film seem not only overly elaborate but scarcely plausible to the point of farce. More ludicrous still is the suggestion that one practises the art of pickpocketing by playing at the pinball machine. When he falls under the tutelage of Kassagi’s character, Michel soon realises his own limitations, noting that ‘My fingers needed exercise to become supple’. A couple of pinball sessions are meant to do the trick, another nod towards Michel as a youthful outsider when one might as well twiddle one’s thumbs, play tiddlywinks or thumb one’s belt loops like the quintessential cowboy in a Western.
For a director mostly regarded as serious and taut or even tightly wound, it is difficult to imagine that Bresson isn’t having fun with some of this imagery. In this way Pickpocket can be riotously funny. When Michel is first probed by the police chief outside of work – a character who belies his lofty title by taking an inordinate level of interest in a petty crook – he expounds a pet theory:
Can we not admit that certain skilled men, gifted with intelligence, talent or even genius and thus indispensible to society, rather than stagnate, should be free to disobey laws in certain cases?
‘That could be difficult. And dangerous’ the police chief responds, but Michel is sure ‘Society could only gain from it’. The police chief takes the conversation in another direction, asking Michel who would get to identify these ‘supermen’ and whether all men don’t regard themselves as somehow exceptional. Yet on a later encounter at the bar he cuts straight to the point, skewering the similarities with Raskolnikov as well as Michel’s pretensions and the philosophical dimensions of the film itself as he bluntly states ‘In any case, even the most skilful pickpocket won’t help humanity progress [. . .] It’s absurd’ after which little more is said on the matter.
Still for all of these limitations or apparent flaws, the short course of Pickpocket proves not only entertaining but affecting. The clunkiness of the acting and some of the dialogue within each scene ultimately cedes to matters of style and form, carried away by some fine cinematography and brisk pacing. Bresson shapes and trims his film with a propulsive force, with the stilted or curt acting part of the point, a bid which is at least semi-successful in making us engage with the themes of displacement, haplessness or inertia and ennui while binding us with the individual characters.
A homoerotic reading of Pickpocket is now part of the canon of the film, and it’s easy to see why given that there is more fizz to the relationship between Michel and his accomplice than there is between any other two characters in the film, never mind all of those prying fingers. Latent homosexuality in the process of becoming is most evident in the montage which occurs when Michel and his accomplice first meet, as Kassagi’s master demonstrates the art of pickpocketing to his newfound student.
Michel – who has the habit of leaving doors open and has already spied his future accomplice through the front door of his apartment building as Kassagi’s character loiters in the street – has just spurned the attentions of Jeanne and Jacques, who have been encouraging him to visit his sick mother. Instead he follows Kassagi’s character on foot and then trolley before confronting him in a bar. ‘Fifteen minutes later, we were friends’ Michel narrates, as the more accomplished pickpocket leads him to the back of the room and begins to showcase his skills. He reaches into Michel’s breast pocket then drops his wallet so that it falls beneath his jacket’s hem, reaches deftly with his first two fingers in a pincer motion once more into Michel’s breast pocket, then flicks open his jacket quarters with such extravagance and flair that you more than half expect him to reveal Michel’s erect penis.
The prying hands of the pickpocket are captured so fancifully that to the modern viewer they may call to mind Nicholas Cage creeping through Peggy Sue’s window in Francis Ford Coppola’s delirious comedy Peggy Sue Got Married. In a later scene on a train when a third accomplice has been added to the act, Michel and Kassagi’s character and one other pass wallets and watches back and forth in a convoluted display, less sleight of hand than elaborate mime and so brazen that it renders the very idea of pickpocketing as no more than artifice.
The implication already is that the pickpocket yearns to be caught. Perhaps stylistically then the film is caught between two poles, Michel’s intractability and at the same time his headlong rush towards some kind of shattered conclusion. It blends its brevity and humour, its clunking manner like the wooden action of a piano with a chord of apostasy or Catholic guilt and a sense of the woman’s burden.
While watching Pickpocket I especially enjoyed the framing scenes at Longchamp Racecourse in western Paris, where among the finery of the attendees Michel is forced to watch or at least adopt the pretence of watching the horse racing, as spurred by a wanton desire he however briefly comes undone. The opening scene is enlivened by the sunlight, the diegetic sound of the racecourse and the bustle of the crowd, all of which counteract and therefore enhance his own hangdog expression, though even here Bresson dabbles in a kind of pun or red herring, because with his first act Michel steals from a woman’s alligator handbag with nary a pocket in sight.
There is an openness to the scenes at Longchamp which is juxtaposed by the close quarters of the rest of the film, whether Michel is milling about his small and unvarnished apartment or in packed bars, cafés and train or metro carriages, with the odd officer’s cap in the corner of the frame, perhaps only of a train attendant, still serving to ratchet up the tension.
The cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel possesses a lean elegance, for instance through the play of reflections in the glass pane which conjure a kind of hyperreality as Michel approaches the bar where he first meets and interacts with his accomplice, framing him momentarily before he pushes the door open, keeping his head down until he gazes up wide-eyed at Kassagi. And when Michel, Jeanne and Jacques go out together one Sunday and stop at a café, Michel and Jeanne frame each other beautifully, her cheek resting against the back of her hand and her elbow propped between wine glasses on the small outdoor table as they stare both wistfully and inattentively into the near distance, or in Michel’s case perhaps into the back of her head.
When Jeanne turns to face Michel she scolds him slightly, saying ‘You’re not in the real world. You share no interests with others’. If the ending to Pickpocket strikes some viewers as transcendent, when it comes to modern cinematic fare it reminded me most of all with the ending to Fargo which finds Margie and Norm doing pretty good.
