Perhaps she shames him with her simplicity. Why does he avoid her? Bresson never supplies motives. Michel does not want to see his mother, but gives Jeanne money for her. She comes to Michel with the news that his mother is dying. She is a neighbor of Michel's mother, and the lover of Michel's friend Jacques ( Pierre Leymarie). The woman in “Pickpocket” is named Jeanne ( Marika Green). Michel, like the hero of Crime and Punishment, has a good woman in his life, who trusts he will be able to redeem himself. The reasoning is immoral, but the characters claim special privileges above and beyond common morality. Bresson's Michel, like Dostoyevsky's hero Raskolnikov, needs money in order to realize his dreams, and sees no reason why some lackluster ordinary person should not be forced to supply it. In this story you may sense echoes of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, another story about a lonely intellectual who lived in a garret and thought he had a license, denied to common men, to commit crimes. That is his moment of release, of triumph over a lesser person-although of course his face never reflects joy. He waits for a moment of distraction,and then opens their purses or slips their wallets from their coats. On the Metro or at the racetrack, he stands as close as possible to his victims, sensing their breathing, their awareness of him. Also, of course, he gets an erotic charge out of stealing. He sits in his garret and reads his books, and treasures an image of himself as a man so special that he is privileged to steal from others. He gathers his narcissism around himself like a blanket. He could probably get a job in a day if he wanted one. To one of them, in a cafe, he wonders aloud if it is all right for an “extraordinary man” to commit a crime-just to get himself started? He usually wears a suit and tie, disappears in a crowd and has few friends. Martin Lassalle, the star of “Pickpocket,” plays Michel as an unexceptional man with a commonplace face. Instead of asking his actors to “show fear,” Bresson asks them to show nothing, and depends on his story and images to supply the fear. What we see in the pickpocket's face is what we bring to it. No emotion, no style, no striving for effect. All Bresson wanted was physical movement. He famously forced the star of “ A Man Escaped” (1956) to repeat the same scene some 50 times,until it was stripped of all emotion and inflection. It's my first Bresson film, and it renews my faith in French movies of that period.Or do we? Bresson, one of the most thoughtful and philosophical of directors, was fearful of “performances” by his actors. So I was kinda left saying, "huh? where did that come from?" But I dunno, maybe I missed something. I think it happened too quickly, whereas the rest of the film was given ample time to breathe. My only criticism is that the ending didn't seem believable to me. It's meticulous and very finely detailed, and that speaks for itself. Instead, this is more subtle in its approach to art. We don't get gratuitous weirdness like long scenes of the backs of people's heads (Godard). And unlike many of the other French "nouvelle vague" directors of the 50s-60s who felt obligated to be weird in order to make a statement, this film was done very lucidly. It's very fluid and keen, capturing so much in each motion, much like Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece "Rope" but even better in many scenes. (But don't expect Faust either.) The camera-work is primo. Instead we get a very complex & original work which, if anything, is more like Faust by Goethe. But don't expect it to go any further than that. There are many allusions to C&P which were quite deliberate. Looks like there are a few negative reviews from misguided people who thought that this was supposed to be an adaptation of Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment".
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