Pickpocket - Criterion Collection
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: C?sar Gattegno, Kassagi, Marika Green, Martin LaSalle, Pierre LeymarieBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 75 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-11-08
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion Collection
Movie Reviews of Pickpocket - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: Gallic Raskolnikov
Summary: 5 Stars
It's taken me awhile to learn how to appreciate Bresson's films--my fault entirely, not his--but now that I've cottoned onto his cinematic way of speaking, I'm progressively overwhelmed with admiration for what he does. No wonder he only produced a handful of films in a lifetime that spans almost an entire century. He's a meticulous master who carefully and unhurriedly plans each of his movies down to his actor's smallest gesture.
"Pickpocket," like so many of Bresson's films, is a combination of visual story-telling and narrative overlay. One hears the story and sees the story in that duplication that is Bresson's signature. (Sometimes, in fact, there's a tripling effect.) A young intellectual convinces himself that he wants neither human attachments nor conventional lifestyle. He is an ubermensch, above the norms of morality and society. Like Raskolnikov, although without the Russian character's horrible transgression, he begins to live outside the law. He becomes a pickpocket, eventually throws his hand in with a gang, and is finally caught and thrown into jail where, with the help of a young woman's love, he realizes that he neither has nor wants the stuff to be an ubermensch. To put it in a biblical phrase that Bresson would probably like, his heart of stone gets replaced with one of flesh.
"Pickpocket" propels the viewer into a kind of denuded landscape in which frills are totally absent. Bresson always used nonactors--he called them "models"--to avoid theatrical falsehoods. He avoided conventional cinematic techniques such as follow-through between scenes. He coached his models in avoiding facial expressions, voice tones, or mannerisms that would manipulate the emotions or empathy of the audience. The flatness of "Pickpocket" is so effective that the final scene, in which the protagonist's cold aloofness melts, at first seems too abrupt, too artificial. Whether it works or not is up to the viewer to decide. But clearly what Bresson is striving for is a sudden whammy effect--a breaking-of-the-ice response on the part of the audience that mirrors the conversion experienced by the protagonist.
The Criterion edition of this film is wonderfully remastered, and its supplemental materials are fascinating. They include interviews with the principle actors 40 years later, a marvelous clip of a pickpocket artist who influenced Bresson's decision to make the film, and most significantly a stunningly brilliant analysis of the film by screenwriter Paul Schrader. Schrader describes Bresson's film as "perverse"--but for Schrader, this is a high compliment, because Bresson's cinematic perversion consists in violating the conventionalities of film making.
At least 6 stars.
Summary of Pickpocket - Criterion Collection
Robert Bresson's masterful investigation of crime and redemption tells the story of arrogant, young Michel, who spends his days learning the art of picking pockets in the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As Michel grows bolder and more aRobert Bresson drew inspiration from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for this examination of an arrogant young pickpocket who deems himself above the laws and conditions of ordinary men. Michel (Martin LaSalle), a rather bland-looking young man with a perpetually blank face, haunts the subways, city streets, and racetracks to ply his trade. He plays a game of wits with a fatherly police inspector and walls his heart off from the affections of a quiet young woman, Jeanne (Marika Green), who looks after his dying mother. Bresson's direction of his "models" (as he calls his nonprofessional performers) strips them of affectation and motivation, making them blank slates defined by the accumulation of precisely drilled actions and words. Pickpocket is no thriller, though Bresson offers impressive, meticulously detailed scenes of daring and intimate robberies (one sequence on a subway feels like an homage to Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street). Rather, it is a powerful, profound search for meaning and spiritual enlightenment by a man who believes in nothing but himself, and many critics consider it Bresson's masterpiece. Paul Schrader, whose book Transcendental Cinema offers a detailed analysis of Bresson's work, has quoted the famous, emotionally restrained yet spiritually moving conclusion in two of his own films: American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. --Sean Axmaker
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