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| The new Criterion Collection Dual-Format release of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket is one of the best Criterion home entertainment packages ever produced. |
And now Pickpocket is available on one of the very best Criterion Collection home entertainment packages they've ever produced. In addition to the film looking better at home than ever before (via a new 2K digital restoration, with my favourite uncompressed monaural sound), the new Dual Format DVD/BluRay release is blessed with the most astonishing collection of added value material. The audio commentary track featuring film scholar James Quandt is, without peer, the finest commentary on Bresson one could ever want and is easily one of the best commentary tracks ever laid down. Quandt is the legendary TIFF Cinematheque senior programmer of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, mastermind of the legendary 2012 retrospective of Bresson's entire canon and the author of the great book "Robert Bresson (Revised), Revised and Expanded Edition (Cinematheque Ontario Monographs)". Also included is an introduction by writer-director Paul Schrader (whose work on Bresson is the only rival to Quandt's in his book "Transcendental Style In Film - Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer"), The Models of “Pickpocket”, a 2003 documentary by Babette Mangolte featuring interviews with actors from Pickpocket, a phenomenal interview with Bresson from the 1960 French TV program Cinépanorama, a 2000 Pickpocket Q and A featuring actor Marika Green and filmmakers Paul Vecchiali and Jean-Pierre Améris, fascinating footage of the sleight-of-hand artist and Pickpocket consultant Kassagi from the 1962 French TV show La piste aux étoiles and last, but not least, a fine essay by novelist and critic Gary Indiana.
Pickpocket (1959) dir. Robert Bresson
Starring: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green,
Pierre Laymarie, Dolly Scal, Jean Pélégri, Kassagi, Pierre Étaix
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Robert Bresson is all about breaking the rules and flouting convention. Pickpocket is no exception to this tradition. What's most phenomenal about Bresson, is that when he's working within a genre framework, he clearly understands the rules and grammar of cinematic language so well that he's able to veer into dangerous territory and do so in such a way that the work is not only fresh, but still delivers the necessary frissons genre pictures need in order to deliver the goods. Like his WWII P.O.W. picture A Man Escaped, Pickpocket is rife with both atmosphere and suspense - both of which soar due to his rule-breaking that places an emphasis on touches so profoundly real that he plunges us deeply into the worlds and minds of his characters in ways most other directors can only TRY to do.
Pickpocket follows the adventures of Michel (Martin La Salle), a sensitive young man who could do anything with his life - he's clearly sharp-witted and intelligent, but when he discovers his talent for picking pockets, he attacks this pursuit with an almost fundamentalist zeal. His mother (Dolly Scal) is dying in poverty and he seeks to redress this situation by stealing. That said, he's so ashamed of his prowess at stealing that he finds it hard to face his mother and leaves her in the more than capable hands of the beautiful Jeanne (Marika Green), a neighbour and caregiver to the old woman. His best friend Jacques (Pierre Laymarie) is aware of Michel's criminal activities and desperately tries to sway him on the right path, but instead, he strikes up a working relationship to with two sleazy accomplices (Kassagi and Pierre Étaix) who not only assist him, but provide additional tutelage so he can become even more brilliant at deftly removing money from the wallets of all manner of marks - mostly in crowded subways (a la Samuel Fuller's classic noir picture Pickup on South Street).
Add to this mix, a cat and mouse game he plays with a police inspector (Jean Pélégri) and it all adds up to a classic crime picture. Bresson's approach to material, an approach that might have been hackneyed in less capable hands, yields a movie that is so original that it feels like a clutch of syrup-laden maraschino cherries on a nice hot fudge ice cream sundae.
Bresson never appears to use any closeups, or for that matter, a sparing use of wide shots. Almost the entire film is framed in medium shots - allowing for a consistent visual treatment that works ever-so beautifully with the perverse cutting style which avoids cutting on action, but does so before or after action. This allows for a deliberate pace that renders the pickpocketing sequences unbearably suspenseful and also makes the pleas of those who love him all the more powerful. In a sense, the audience almost becomes a part of the Greek chorus of those who would have Michel walk the straight and narrow.
This, in a nutshell, is very cool.
Bresson's approach also captures the world and atmosphere with utter perfection. Everything from the cafes, to Michel's austere apartment, the racetracks, the crowded subways and his mother's death room all have the unmistakeable whiff of real life. They're not stylized in the usual fashion of crime films - no baroque, noir-ish qualities here. He shoots it all straight on and in this fashion, creates both consistency in his mise-en-scene, but a world that never feels manufactured.
This is the beauty of Bresson, of course. He doesn't want to overtly manipulate the proceedings, but in his austerity he does indeed, like all great filmmakers - manipulate AND manufacture.
Is it any surprise that redemption, of some kind, is just around the corner? And, given the film's indebtedness to Dostoyevsky, the redemption is not overburdened with the usual tropes of morality. Morality hovers just above the surface, but doesn't actually get in the way of the picture's emotional and narrative trajectory. Immoral behaviour is, frankly, a lot of fun to experience - at least vicariously - and Bresson does not deny us this simple pleasure. He just does it in ways that no other directors have ever been able to successfully master in quite the same way.
Pickpocket is a corker of a crime picture and because Bresson infuses it with his unique voice, it's not only a fine bedfellow with the best of Chabrol, Clouzot and Melville, but occasionally astral-projects itself above the mutual resting place of the aforementioned.
Robert Bresson strikes again.
Pickpocket is a great picture and one that served as a huge inspiration to all the crime pictures that followed it.
Oh, and just for fun, watch Pickpocket back-to-back with Paul Schrader's American Gigolo and you'll be plunged into movie-geek Heaven. I won't explain further. Just do it.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** Five Stars
"Pickpocket" is available on the Criterion Collection. To read my opening tribute to Bresson and James Quandt's legendary 2012 TIFF Bell Lightbox retrospective, feel free to visit The Robert Bresson Man-Cave™ HERE.
