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Pickpocket
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There
is a prominent credit at the start of Pickpocket to the mysteriously named Kassagi, who is not only part of the cast as
‘Accomplice 1’ but, even more importantly, ‘Technical Adviser for the Thieves’
Gestures’. And what gestures they are! Nimble fingers that steal into breast
pockets, a hand that drops a wallet in a split-second beat down to another hand
(his own or someone else’s), swift movements that transfer an object from a newspaper
to a bag to a coat …
Robert
Bresson may well have found Kassagi in the criminal underworld. Cinematographer
Léonce-Henry Burel tells the story of a day on set when, due to complex outdoor
filming, several gendarmes were present to supervise crowds and traffic. At the
end of the day, Kassagi took these cops to the pub – where he revealed to them
every key, wallet and watch he had surreptitiously stolen from them while they
worked. (1) After the film wrapped, Kassagi was too well known to return to a life
of crime. Instead, he started on a successful career as a music-hall and
cabaret entertainer. His magic skill of prestidigitation moved from streets and
train stations to the showbiz stage.
Pickpocket is all about the
transformation of an identity. Michel (Martin Lasalle) represents the fanciful
temptation of living beyond the law. Depending on what you bring to the film,
this character is an archetype derived from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or French existentialist philosophy; or he is
a rebel-hero who anticipates the restless anarchism of any period in any
country since. Babette Mangolte, who made the wonderful documentary Pickpocket’s Models (2003) first saw the
film a year before the events of May 1968; for her it expressed “what it is to
be a student in Paris and also the desire to be a criminal, which is a profound
insight into people’s desires.” (2)
For
this reason, Michel is also a superb figure of cinema. He is single-minded,
obsessed, driven; but also an ascetic, bookworm intellectual (and hence the
model for Paul Schrader’s leading men from Taxi
Driver [1976] to Light Sleeper [1991]
and beyond). He is caught up in an escalating thrill that Bresson captures so
well in each new, extravagant round of thievery – culminating in a veritable group-ballet
of three pickpockets that rivals the finest piece of Hollywood musical
choreography. He is an amalgam of both Gangster (increasingly suspicious and
paranoid, like Scorsese’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas [1990]) and Artist (always
pre-visualising, rehearsing, staging … directing).
Pickpocket exists to take this
fascinating character through the gauntlet of his own fixated, solipsistic
desire … but to where, exactly?
Commentators on the film have given this destination at the end of Michel’s
journey many names, often with a religious ring: Grace, Fate, Predestination,
Redemption, Providence. Filmmaker Marco Bellocchio puts it in simpler, earthier
terms: “The madness of a man … is defeated by … a beautiful woman, who [is] not
mad”. (3) Michel’s last-moment swerve towards humanity (and normality) has been
copied in dozens of subsequent films, almost never convincingly. What secret
Bressonian ingredient are they lacking or missing?
Whatever
it is can surely be found in those thieves’ gestures. Bresson chanced here –
perhaps while watching Kassagi at work – upon the immortal fusion of his
content (his themes and philosophies) and his form, that famous method, system
or syntax which belongs authentically to him and nobody else. The deep mystery
of Pickpocket is: what moves Michel? What leads him to his
decisive moment of change, transformation? To put it another way, it is the
mystery of cause and effect – in that
realm that both bridges and separates fiction (where linear cause-and-effect
chains come easy) from life and philosophy (strong case: Paul Ricoeur’s
life-long reflections on time, narrative and Freudian psychoanalysis).
But
this mystery is not going to be solved by recourse either to Hollywood-style
linear classicism (where the Hero’s Will is the cause and drives forward to the
ultimately desired effect) or to the limply spiritual bromide that “Fate works
in mysterious ways” (or, a popular Bressonian axiom, “the wind blows where it
will”). Nor will it do to desert ideas of cause and effect altogether for the
sake of some ideal of anti-narrative or Surrealism Unbound (à la Ruiz). Raymond
Durgnat aptly evokes Chaos Theory to conjure the tangle of factors that move
Michel on (4) – but there is something in the film far closer and more precise
to hand, whereby Bresson stalks this mystery.
Pickpocketing
is, quite literally, the movement, the action, of something mysterious in the
world. This is the stroke of genius in Bresson’s film, to find this correlative
which is never just a symbol or a metaphor. The act, the gesture, the process
of pickpocketing is physically visible, and yet swifter than the camera-eye or
viewer-eye can register; now you see it, but you don’t. Bresson, with the
close-up inserts of details he loves so much, abstracts this action of theft:
there is no longer a criminal and a victim, but only parts of bodies, dancing,
interchangeable, fused into a rhythm that calls up the lush music of Lully …
You
can call this movement of a trans-personal force in the world something Divine,
a Spirit or Soul; or you can quit the heavenly metaphors and think of it as the
movement of Eros, a chaste but thrillingly intense sexuality within the bustling,
metropolitan everyday. But the greatness of Bresson’s best films lies in the
way that we can never finally adjudicate between, or even separate, the
material and the spiritual, the ecstasy of the transcendent and the ecstasy of
the flesh. Mystery, in Bresson, is also an entertainment, a performance, a
magic-show. The sublime category of Mystery can easily carry the weight of the
vulgar.
A
preliminary text from the auteur advises us that the style of Pickpocket is “not that of a thriller”.
He’s kidding, isn’t he? Bresson had already made one of the most thrilling,
suspenseful films in cinema history (the Resistance prison tale A Man Escaped, 1956), and he would do it
again in Pickpocket. It is hard to
imagine Bresson had not seen the opening of Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), and
impossible for a cinephile not to think ahead to Jean-Pierre Melville’s
maniacally detailed crime procedurals like Le Samouraļ (1967).
But
Bressonian suspense, it is true, has nothing much to do with Hollywood’s, or
Hitchcock’s, techniques. Bresson worked with a savagely pared-down economy of
elements focused on with blinding concentration; that is what we would be
prone, these days, to call minimalism, if it did not rocket the narrative of Pickpocket forward with an elliptical
pace that is completely exhilarating.
Disarming, too. There is something almost
outrageous, quietly comic, in Bresson’s stylisations. (He loved the
screen-and-circus comedy of Tati, Keaton, Chaplin.) Take a look and listen to
the first three shots: after the preliminary image of Michel writing his
account, there is a dissolve to a woman’s gloved hand (it, too, could be
criminal!) daintily transferring money from a purse to a male hand; this old
chap, now shown full-body, walks over to a betting booth, as the sound (even
more than the image or setting) informs us that we are at a racetrack; this
man, at the end of his action, turns and shoots a sudden suspicious glance
off-screen. Cut to Michel, static but alert and nervy. What we need to know
about his state of mind is instantly punched in via voice-over narration: “I
was now determined. But would I be bold enough?” In around twenty seconds, the
plot is already flying.
This introductory vignette perfectly
encapsulates everything about Bresson’s style: its hard cuts on looks and
glances as well as its soft dissolves that link objects across diverse times,
scenes and spaces; its driven will to skip as much superfluous incident,
exposition and explanation as possible (later, we won’t even see Michel’s two
years of “gambling and women” in London); and its penchant for what filmmakers
call the reveal (Michel is always
discovering strange things in his path: his best friend in his humble
apartment, Jeanne’s baby on the floor … ). Nick Cave’s brilliant description of
Mark’s Gospel is apposite: "A
clatter of bones, so raw, nervy and lean on information that the narrative
aches with the melancholy of absence.” (5)
The
most controversial element of Bresson’s style, yesterday as today, is the use
of what he termed models:
non-professionals who rigorously had any tics or mannerisms of expressivity
knocked out of them during endless rehearsals. In their blankness,
paradoxically, they become full, reflective of everything around them, and the
desires we project onto them – or, at least, this was Bresson’s artistic gamble.
The model-legacy in cinema is evident in everything from Alain Cavalier (Thérèse, 1986) to Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds, 2002) via the entire
œuvre of Aki Kaurismäki – and not always happily. Even in Bresson’s own work,
models can too easily become zombies or sleepwalkers, reflecting little or nothing,
unbearable to see and hear.
But
in Pickpocket, there is life in these
models: Lasalle, looking a little like Montgomery Clift, is like a spring
coiled tight, eyes darting, shoulders hunched forward, ever-ready for action
(Mark Rappaport has rightly knocked the assumption that it is merely passive
non-acting); (6) and Marika Green (aunt of Eva Green) is the sort of tough,
terse, impossibly sublime beauty that Bresson often found: the film casts only
a sidelong glance at Jeanne’s story, but it is still a fascinating one, poised
enigmatically between the ethereal and the carnal. Even the thinnest, most
schematic figures – like Jean Pélégri as the benevolent, debating-team Man
of the Law – have a homely, street-smart vibe here.
In
1959, Pickpocket hit France (it was
not a commercial success) as a powerful statement of intent by Bresson: almost
a film à thèse in its rigour and
systematicity, it made no concessions to public or industry in its curious
blend of realism and unrealism. In a master stroke, Bresson imposed his Will on the cinematograph (as
he always referred to it). (7) Moving away from costume projects (Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, 1945) and
overly religious subjects (The Diary of a
Country Priest, 1950) of earlier years – even from the shrunken world of
the hero’s cell in A Man Escaped –
Bresson announced, to the discomfort of many, that henceforth every part of the
modern landscape was available to his transformative, nimble fingers. The film
is not part of the Nouvelle Vague, but influenced it profoundly: this urban any-space-whatever (to use Gilles Deleuze’s
term) (8) comprised of bare rooms, bars, parks and métro stations set the
cityscape for a hundred subsequent freewheeling improvisations by others.
Pickpocket is a film that you
fall into, that sticks to you and haunts you. It is rich enough to invite and uphold
readings of wildly different orientation – as Jacques Lourcelles makes clear in
this musing: “I think that theft is here the metaphor for any activity carried
out beyond and against society, for all those energies which, by not serving
society, deny it; but it can also just as easily be taken as a film about
homosexual cruising, or the passion for gambling”. (9)
Most
strikingly, Pickpocket prompts
unfathomably lyrical reveries in those it most deeply touches – as if Bresson
had found the fragile yet lasting expression for something quite inexpressible,
ineffable. For Mangolte it captures “that endless waiting peculiar to an age in
life which seemed eternal and for which time did not exist”; (10) for Chris
Auty, “the constant, restless evaporation of our daily lives”; (11) for
filmmaker André Téchiné (a little ironically), “the passage from jouissance to love”; (12) and for
Raymond Durgnat, it is about stealing as “accepting responsibility, accepting
reciprocity, enlarging oneself by accepting the subjectivity of other people.”
(13) But, for me, it is one of those precious films (another is Claude Sautet’s Nelly and Mr Arnaud [1995]) that frontally tackles – whilst maintaining the aura
and mystery of – a decisive moment in
which a life is irrevocably changed and redirected.
There
is another master of legerdemain hidden within Pickpocket – with a strange (and hitherto unremarked) Australian
connection. A book circulates between Michel, his friend Jacques and the Chief
Inspector – The Prince of Pickpockets,
written by Richard S. Lambert in 1930 – and its subject, George Barrington, is
discussed several times. Barrington was an extravagant criminal legend in
London; when he was finally arrested and deported to Australia in 1851, his
mere presence was enough to win the colony the dubious title of ‘The Continent
of Pickpockets’. But Barrington turned his life around; moving swiftly to the
side of the law, he became Superintendent of Convicts
at Parramatta – and the author of a book on penal colony history.
One would say that, like Michel, Barrington had renounced his evil
ways – except that, a century later, his book was revealed to be a work of
theft, plagiarised wholesale! Suzanne Rickard, editor of a new edition of Barrington’s Voyage to Botany Bay,
describes this strange figure in Australian history as “archetypal … a folk
hero in elegant dress, the implicit model of the universal sinner, saved from
himself by the generous act of transportation, and provided with a new life and
new identity.” (14) That works well as a description of Michel.
As a film artist, Robert Bresson devoted his life to offering us
his generous acts of transportation. Durgnat judged the “emotional intensity”
of his work to be “generated by his terse, almost secretive, style”. (15) Kassagi,
Michel, Barrington, Bresson: all of them artists, showmen, inspired and driven
thieves in the bright daylight, involved in something spectacular, secretive –
and magical.
MORE Bresson: L'Argent, Au hasard Balthazar, The Trial of Joan of Arc
1.
Rui Nogueira, “Burel & Bresson”, in James Quandt (ed.), Robert Bresson (Toronto: Cinematheque
Ontario, 1998), pp. 518-9. back
2.
Brian Price and Drake Stutesman, “Babette Mangolte Interview”, Framework, Vol 45 No 1 (Spring 2004), p.
51. back
3.
Marco Bellocchio, in Quandt (ed.), p. 528. back
4.
Raymond Durgnat, “Pickpocket”, Film Comment, Vol. 35 No. 3 (May/June
1999), p. 53. back
5.
Nick Cave, in Richard Holloway (ed.), Revelations:
Personal Responses to the Books of the Bible (London: Canongate Books,
2004). back
6.
Mark Rappaport, “Pickpocket –
Revisited, Again”, in Quandt (ed.), second revised edition, pp. 339-353. back
7. See Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer (København: Green Integer, 1997) – a more accurate rendering
of the original French title is Notes on
the Cinematograph, a usage to which the most recent edition (New York
Review Books Classics, 2016) has at last conformed. back
8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 108-122. back
9.
Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du
cinéma: les films (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), p. 1147. back
10.
Babette Mangolte, “Breaking Silence (Forty Years Later)”, in Quandt (ed.), p.
276. back
11.
John Pym (ed.), Time Out Film Guide
Eighth Edition (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 811. back
12.
Olivier Assayas, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Benoît Jacquot, André Téchiné, Thierry
Jousse and Serge Toubiana, “Autour de Pickpocket”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 416 (February
1989), p. 32. back
13.
Durgnat in Quandt (ed.), p. 444. back
14. Suzanne Rickard, “Prince of Pickpockets”, Lingua Franca (Radio National, Australia,
7 July 2001). back
15. Raymond Durgnat, “Pickpocket”, Films and Filming (October 1960). back
© Adrian Martin February 2005 / August 2006 / December 2012 |
