***½
Country: France
Director: Robert Bresson
When I took a cinema course in college, the instructor showed the class Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, a film in which a young priest finds himself assigned to a diocese in rural France. He struggles in vain to make a spiritual impression on his thoroughly hateful parishioners, enduring the mental anguish of his failure as he suffers the physical torment of slowly dying from cancer. I understood that Bresson intended the young curate's anguish as an expression of transcending earthly pain and failure to a higher level of spirituality. Yet for me watching the film was a grim, torturous, almost masochistic experience in which the contemplation of suffering became an end in itself. I have never been able to watch this type of movie with any enjoyment, and I felt little desire ever to see another film by Bresson. Reading about his later works like Au Hasard, Balthazar and Mouchette only strengthened this feeling. But when I watched Pickpocket recently, I found it a rewarding, if predictably somber, experience.
The main character in Pickpocket is a young man named Michel (Martin La Salle, who resembles the young Montgomery Clift). Unemployed, disaffected, but apparently well educated, he lives a solitary, bleak, and impoverished life in a grungy one-room apartment in Paris. One day in the Métro, he observes someone picking the pocket of a fellow passenger and decides to give it a try. Encouraged by the success of his first attempt, he continues. But he's not a professional and is soon arrested. The police don't have enough evidence to press charges, though, and an inspector who recognizes that Michel is no ordinary petty criminal releases him. The two strike up a curious relationship as friendly adversaries in which the inspector tries to convince Michel that crime is not a valid way of life, while Michel tries to convince him that some people are by nature above the law. It's hard to say whether Michel's attraction to thievery arises from practical necessity or really is a philosophical stance; there is probably a bit of each in it. In either case, there is plainly more than a little defiance and self-centeredness in Michel's personality.