Pickpocket

Robert Bresson, 1959


 Robert Bresson is a small, quietly expressive man with a vaguely rodent-like face and the floppy coiffure of a French genius. In a clip included at the end of the Pickpocket, Bresson articulates and defends his uniquely minimalist sense of cinema with clarity, humility, and a controlled passion that bubbles into his smile and gestures. One senses that Bresson has thought his world through. That he has grappled with the dark currents of vice and failure, cruelty and cosmic indifference, and that slowly, deliberately, courageously, he has made his peace with these things. What strikes is how well he has come through the peace process: how for all its sinister silence, its perversion and its suffering, Pickpocket remains a film of redemption.

The Pickpocket is Bresson's version of Crime and Punishment. From the avuncular cop to a misguided theory of supermen, the allusions and parallels to the Russian novel of transfiguration follow one another in relentless sequence. On some level, the very ease with which Bresson's moral vision can be registered with Dosteyevski's tempts one to call the Frenchman a Russian spiritualist and have done with it. This may be too easy. Certainly, the reconstruction of the divine within the base, cruel, and capricious world of human affairs is an important theme for both men, and neither defends faith with tools more potent than glimpses into scenes of rediscovery. On the other hand, redemption for Dostoyevski is a genuine return to the embrace of divine love, a true spiritual and behavioral transfiguration, while it may be that Bresson's redemption is hardly distinguishable from his perdition. One almost suspects that what redeems the characters in Pickpocket is not so much a change on their part, but rather of ours, of a softening towards an admission of empathy with profound moral ambiguity. Bresson's genius is in drawing characters sufficiently loosely that this movement becomes possible.

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