Michel (Martin LaSalle) eyes a potential target in Robert Bresson’s highly influential masterpiece PICKPOCKET
PICKPOCKET (Robert Bresson, 1959)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, July 30, $10, 12:30, 4:00, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, July 30, $16, 7:30
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
Robert Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket is a stylistic marvel, a brilliant examination of a deeply troubled man and his dark obsessions. Evoking Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Martin LaSalle made his cinematic debut as Michel, a ne’er-do-well Parisian who lives in a decrepit apartment, refuses to visit his ailing mother (Dolly Scal), and decides to become a pickpocket. But it’s not necessarily the money he’s after; he hides the cash and watches that he steals in his room, which he is unable to lock from the outside. Instead, his petty thievery seems to give him some kind of psychosexual thrill, although his pleasure can seldom be seen in his staring, beady eyes. As the film opens, Michel is at the racetrack, dipping his fingers into a woman’s purse in an erotically charged moment that is captivating, instantly turning the viewer into voyeur. Of course, film audiences by nature are a kind of peeping Tom, but Bresson makes them complicit in Michel’s actions; although there is virtually nothing to like about the character, who is distant and aloof when not being outright nasty, even to his only friends, Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) and Jeanne (Marika Green), the audience can’t help but breathlessly root for him to succeed as he dangerously dips his hands into men’s pockets on the street and in the Metro. Soon he is being watched by a police inspector (Jean Pélégri), to whom he daringly gives a book about George Barrington, the famed “Prince of Pickpockets,” as well as a stranger (Kassagi) who wants him to join a small cadre of thieves, leading to a gorgeously choreographed scene of the men working in tandem as they pick a bunch of pockets. Through it all, however, Michel remains nonplussed, living a strange, private life, uncomfortable in his own skin. “You’re not in this world,” Jeanne tells him at one point.
Michel (Martin LaSalle) can’t keep his hands to himself in Bresson classic
Bresson (Au hasard Balthazar, Diary of a Country Priest) fills Pickpocket with visual clues and repeated symbols that add deep layers to the narrative, particularly an endless array of shots of hands and a parade of doors, many of which are left ajar and/or unlocked in the first half of the film but are increasingly closed as the end approaches. Shot in black-and-white by Léonce-Henri Burel — Bresson wouldn’t make his first color film until 1969’s Un femme douce — Pickpocket also has elements of film noir that combine with a visual intimacy to create a moody, claustrophobic feeling that hovers over and around Michel and the story. It’s a mesmerizing performance in a mesmerizing film, one of the finest of Bresson’s remarkable, and remarkably influential, career. In a scheduling quirk, Pickpocket is screening on July 30 at two different locations in the city. First, at 12:30, 4:00, and 7:30, it will be shown at FIAF, concluding the CinémaTuesdays series “Highlights of Cannes Film Festival with Gilles Jacob,” consisting of works chosen by festival president Jacob in honor of the glamorous event’s sixty-fifth anniversary. Also at 7:30, it will be presented at the IFC Center by writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Affliction), who called the film “an unmitigated masterpiece” in his extensive 1969 two-part review in the Los Angeles Free Press and told Sheila Johnston in a 2003 interview for the Telegraph, “I adore Pickpocket and can watch it endlessly. To me it’s as close to perfect as there can be.”