Durgnat on Pickpocket

 

Excerpts of Ray Durgnat’s review on Pickpocket,

Film Comment, 1999, 35 (3) pp. 48 -51

 

Pickpocket, like Citizen Kane, upfronts the unknowability of soul and destiny. Kane is spectacular, theatrical, noisily virtuoso; it's a "maximalist" movie. Pickpocket is spare, frugal, elliptical; "cine-minimalist."

Kane heavily proclaims its “inner story” (Rosebud-into-Kane), but doesn't tell it (or tells it only as “dollar-book Freud,” i.e., generalized theory without local knowledge). Bresson's fast, fluid, twisting narrative abounds in ellipses, gaps, silences, which “make strange” Michel's devious growth, from “fleur du mal” to straight citizen.

Both stories are told in flashbacks (a news magazine, Michel's jottings). Kane's friends editorialize heavily, Michel scantily or subtly (“I thought” insinuates “wrongly”). His reticence is “attitude” of a kind: not “objectivity” exactly, but detachment, from his earlier self.

Of all Bresson's films, Pickpocket is closest to the French New Wave. In 1959 already, it deploys the same stylistic, fully evolved, perfectly accomplished: camera-calligraphy, as nimble as handheld; real locations; near-available lighting; disorienting cuts; strong shades-of-gray shots (between Dreyer and Rivette); a velvety moodiness (Malle); a psychology concerned to “mix” impulse, drift; and moral choice (Truffaut, Rohmer, early Godard); a related milieu - educated youth, marginalizing itself. Its Young Fogeys shared moral severity, of a worldly kind, with Hitchcock the sado-Catholic and Bresson the fastidious purist.

*** 

Pickpocket is solidly traditional, though also unconventional - like thorough Christianity. It reconciles realism and auteurist subjectivity by its selection from, and stylization of, real possibilities. It pushes mainstream devices, like riddle and ellipsis, to the point of qualitative change; but it's less a subversion than a new, adaptative mutation of an old Christian ethos.

As regards, not genre exactly, but “modality,” I'd call it a lyrical drama. It stays close to its protagonist's conscious experience, without being limited to his POV. It integrates individual psychology, social description, moral issues, etc., so that no single “level of logic” (or “structure”) can determine the story. Its loose succession of short, swift scenes resembles a “journal,” or a loose “chronicle,” like epic form, though its spirit, and logic, are radically different.

Nonetheless, it's a "well-constructed" drama, tightly obsessional, as David Mamet prescribes - "No characterization except in action." There's even a three-act structure. In a nutshell: Act I, the Road to Ruin: Michel learns thieving skills, and his mother's death cuts his last link with "Society," but it also introduces him to Jeanne. Act II, Triumph and Defeat: now a viable thief, with congenial accomplices, he abandons Jeanne to his priggish friend Jacques, but counter-pressure by the Detective-Inspector starts his panic flight to London. Act III, Returning: he volunteers responsibility for Jeanne, and her child by Jacques, gets a job, but, under temptation, briefly backslides, until prison, near-suicide, and Jeanne seal his redemption.

***

[…] the film's rich psychology mustn't eclipse its core theme: the mysteriousness of its “pickpocket's progress.” Its causality is honeycombed with chance, as if to imply that our lives, even our salvation, must obey Chaos Theory. Materialists will speak of “The Absurd,” “Blind Fate,” etc.; Christians and their fellow-travellers dare hope it's Providence. (Accident/Providence - a Resnais theme). God or Chaos: which do you serve? “God turns the devil's tricks to his own ends”; “it's not what happens to you but how you respond.” These Christian rationalizations, even if true, might impoverish faith, which is acceptance-without-passivity.

Bresson rarely explains: rather, he intimates. The “gaps,” the “silences,” take their meaning from their context (which, being a drama, is contradictions, collisions...). It's a kind of montage of dramatic elements. Its basic coordinates are obliquely implied (e.g., Jeanne asks Michel, “Don't you believe?”, as if she'd assumed people had, i.e., it seems a “natural state” to her).

Throughout, basic mindsets, like “the soul,” fill the screen, in the form of set, “impassive” faces and bodies, like “basic mental states” (like Michel's eyes, defiant-ashamed or mutely blazing, his drooping shoulders, his shallow, tinny voice). Bresson's reticence is not so much refusal to explain (though I think he dreads glib verbalizations) as, quite straightforwardly, how he thinks, nonverbally, visually. In his mind's eye he sees Michel, feelingly, from outside and inside at once. As sternly detached as Bresson's morality may be, he understands Michel's weaknesses from within. The long pickpocketing sequence lyricizes Michel's predatory skill, as a “state of grace,” of an immoral, animal kind. It's a “dance for sly hands,” a “ballet mecanique,” rivaling Leger and Dziga-Vertov, but, secretive, subversive. It's also an instructional, like those wartime documentaries on “Correct Use of the Bayonet." It's simultaneously materialist and “spiritual.” Or, as that excellent critic Henri Agel might say, its poetic is “essentialist.”

Patterns and symmetries, planned or not, abound: two bus rides, two letters from Jeanne, two detectives, two curious hand movements like “blessings,” two references to gambling (seen, I think, as more passive, yet more honest, than stealing). Michel moves through a maze of cell-like spaces, imposed on varied settings by style: tight framing, taut angles, dynamic shot-separation, and a sort of “tunnel vision,” with narrow-angle lenses on small areas, like head-and-shoulders or small furtive spaces, like wallets leaving breast pockets ....