| GENIUS STEALS : Robert Bresson's Pickpocket [6/10] |
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| Sunday, 13 March 2005 | |
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Michel (Martin La Salle) is an intense, quiet, bookish Parisian in his mid-20s. Obsessively ruminating on intellectual issues and debating them in cafes with his friend Jacques (Pierre Leymarie), Michel concludes that society should allow its most elite members to commit certain minor crimes. He puts his theories into practice by becoming a pickpocket. This immediately brings him into contact with the police - L'Inspecteur Principal (Jean Pelegri) turns out to be indulgently bemused and intrigued by Michel's exploits. Eluding arrest, Michel is rapidly educated in the ways of the ‘dip' by a skilled, streetwise practitioner (‘Kassagi'). His ‘takings' soon improve - but he cannot bring himself to visit his gravely-ill mother (Dolly Scal). She is nursed by a young neighbour, Jeanne (Marika Green), who finds herself increasingly attracted to Michel despite his ultra-serious demeanour. He does not reciprocate. In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard was noisily rewriting the rules of film grammar with A bout de souffle - and Bresson, a relative ‘elder statesman' of French cinema, was pushing forward with a rather lower-key, but ultimately no less influential, form of experimentalism. Because the rigorously austere Pickpocket was one of the first major fictional features to cast non-professional ‘actors' - leading-man LaSalle went on to accumulate a long string of credits, often in big-budget productions. Bresson's preference for non-professionals (which he was to employ in all of his subsequent features) often yielded remarkable results - but sometimes backfired, as with the static, drab Le diable probablement (1977). Here La Salle, who has to carry the main burden of nearly every scene, is frequently little more than a gloomy, staring blank. And Michel is less a character, more a mouthpiece for Bresson's ideas - to the extent that you wonder why the writer-director didn't just cut out the middle-man and play the role himself. Michel's actions don't really make coherent sense - especially in the latter stages, when the story jumps abruptly forward to a wildly unconvincing finale in which Michel unexpectedly reveals a heart to go alongside an overworked brain. Michel's ‘explanatory' voice-over feels like something a Hollywood studio might have demanded - up till this point, he'd done a pretty good impression of Peter Cook's uber-sardonic noli me tangere pop-star Dremble Wedge* from Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967.) That said, Pickpocket does feature several scenes which are worthy of its ongoing status as a revered classic - especially the skilfully choreographed, almost balletic sequence in which we see Michel and his accomplices silently pull off a string of audacious ‘dips,' filmed in claustrophobic close-up. Indeed, Pickpocket generally works much better when dialogue is at a minimum, or, preferably, absent altogether - a little of Michel's sophomoric self-analysis goes a long way. A charitable view would be that Bresson fully intended Michel to be abrasively unsympathetic, emotionally inconsistent and gratingly pretentious - if so, he succeeded all too well. Neil Young 11th March, 2005 PICKPOCKET : [6/10] : France 1959 : Robert BRESSON : 75 mins seen at Side Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 6th March 2005 - public show * I don't care / I don't want you / I don't need you / I don't love you / Leave me alone. I'm self-contained / Just go away / I'm fickle / I'm cold / I'm shallow / You fill me with inertia. Don't get excited / Save your breath / Cool it / I'm not interested / It's too much effort / Don't you ever leave off? / I'm not available. "Bedazzled", (performed by ‘Dremble Wedge and The Vegetation') |
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