![]() ![]() But stealing has a specific psychosexual meaning for him, beyond fulfilling the simple need to eat. Les mise?rables, after all, is about a man implacably hounded by the law for stealing a loaf of bread. ![]() Often it is necessary, and its drastic punishment is more wicked than the crime. His decision to tempt exposure and shame on a daily basis is a difficult one, but not because he wonders, terrified like Raskolnikov, whether he’s truly capable of it. ![]() They are enlarged to epic scale only by his neurasthenic imagination. His crimes never rise above the level of common, small-time transgression. A man commits forbidden acts, gets caught, and goes to prison, where his suffering is ameliorated by the steadfast love of a good woman.īut Pickpocket’s central character, Michel (played by the Uruguayan nonactor Martin LaSalle), with his watery, feebly asserted version of Raskolnikov’s Nietzscheanism, is merely a petty thief, conspicuously lacking the will to monstrosity of Dostoyevsky’s ax murderer. Some of them were plausible, some undoubtedly true, but many just sounded convincing once art becomes a religion, you can say any high-minded nonsense about it with utter impunity.Īs per standard critical note, Pickpocket is obviously “inspired” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Since I hadn’t absorbed the truisms about Bresson that even then encased his work in a gelatin of spiritually heroic cliche?s, I was, after Pickpocket, skeptical about the thematic platitudes critics and film writers routinely and confidently attached to him. (Even on acid, I was never one to enjoy Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens it was also the first movie I saw on LSD. Bresson is the real deal, at least with these two films.Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. There isn’t even the slightest hint of the youthful posturing I often find in the other French New Wave figures of the time, as talented and influential as they were (there is a reason that Werner Herzog referred to Godard’s films as ‘intellectual counterfeit money’ in comparison with a good kung-fu movie). Of the two recent Bressons, I may every so slightly favor Balthazar as a perfect match of story and vision with Christian parable, but Pickpocket is still up there as one of the great works of cinema. It kinda surprises me when I read reviewers only mentioning the classic Russian novel Crime and Punishment (the only one of those heavy tomes of Dostoevsky I’ve actually dared to take on) in passing as if there are only slight comparisons with Pickpocket, when in fact the entire structure of the narrative (and the characters), including the ending of salvation through love (played up even more with the infrequent but always powerful orchestral baroque music) and the pickpocket’s openly flaunting manner in detailing his belief in the privilege of the “superior” delivered directly to the policeman who suspects him of the crimes, is almost straight out of the speeches of Dostoevsky’s morally lost Raskolnikov and his antagonistic relationship with the figure of the law shadowing him. Bresson’s austere style and minimalist approach with the actors (spending much of their time looking down at the floor, only raising their eyes to briefly interact or study something) works brilliantly in foregrounding not only the philosophical implications of Michel’s approach to life, but also, almost ironically, the thrill of seeing the master pickpockets at work (in great detail). ![]()
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