![]() ![]() Redemption, as usual in Bresson, is enigmatic but evocative. His purpose was not verisimilitude, but a particular effect. the lovers’ quarrels of Lancelot of the Lake), and I don’t suppose he particularly sought out topics that lent themselves to impassive acting. Yet in a profound sense this is irrelevant Bresson would bring the same stylistic rigor to any subject (cf. To this Jeanne asks, like Marie in Balthazar, “Do you believe in nothing?” Michel answers, “I believed in God, Jeanne, for three minutes.” Significantly, the occasion of Michel’s three-minute encounter with God is a funeral.Įven more than A Man Escaped, Pickpocket offers an ideal case for Bresson’s insistence on naked actions devoid of acting, since Michel’s occupation requires him to suppress any sign of emotion. “Judged how? According to laws? It’s absurd,” he scoffs. What can be said is that lurking behind Michel’s theories of supermen above the rules is resistance to the idea of higher rules, a higher judgment. “You share no interests with others.” Even the experienced thief (sleight-of-hand artist Kassagi) who becomes a mentor to Michel never gets to know him, nor vice versa.ĭoes Michel want to be caught? Does he taunt the inspector because he feels untouchable, or is there another reason? As always, Bresson examines actions but offers little attention to motives, an approach that here seems to suggest that Michel’s choices may be a mystery even to himself, his threadbare theorizing only rationalization. ![]() “You’re not in the real world,” Jeanne (Marika Green), a young neighbor of Michel’s mother, tells him. Unlike Fonda’s Wrong Man character, a decent family man whose life and relationships are thrown into upheaval when he is wrongly suspected of a crime, Michel is an isolated loner who holds himself at arm’s length from other people, avoiding contact with others until his life of crime results in someone else making contact with him.Īt least twice in the film Michel fails to recognize people he has met before, a symptom, perhaps, of his inability to engage other people. There’s something else Michel can’t do: make contact with other people. Then they’d stop.” The inspector, though, knows better: Michel can’t stop, until something stops him. Yet he’s not as unusual as he affects to be, judging from the sophistries he exchanges with a police inspector (Jean Pelegri) about “supermen” of such genius and value to society that they are above ordinary rules, and can commit crimes rather than “stagnate.” Uneasily aware of the shabbiness of his position, he adds half-heartedly, “Don’t worry, it would only be at first. ![]() By contrast, Pickpocket’s Michel, a bland, lazy intellectual, is an atypical thief, for he tells us in the first lines that those who do such things don’t tell about them, yet he has done them and is telling us. In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda’s a hard-working musician is an everyman, an anybody. In some respects Pickpocket is a mirror image of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. The enigmatic climax, while more challenging than Bresson’s previous films, anticipates the later, increasingly difficult Bresson of Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette. Structurally, Pickpocket’s story of a guilty man spending nearly the whole film evading the consequences of his actions is an almost perfect mirror image of the innocent prisoner’s escape efforts in A Man Escaped (there is even an early abortive brush with the law mirroring the early abortive escape attempt in the previous film). The opening shot, with Michel (Martin La Salle, whose much-noted resemblance to The Wrong Man’s Henry Fonda may have been a factor in his casting) simultaneously writing and narrating his story (or confession), overtly recalls the director’s first distinctively Bressonian masterpiece, Diary of a Country Priest. ![]()
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