Robert Bresson’s hypnotically intense and lucid movie-novella from 1959 is now revived as part of a director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and whatever creakiness I thought I saw in this masterly film for its last UK re-release has vanished. The andante pace of Pickpocket is part of its brilliance, part of its seriousness and its status as a cinema of ideas: a movie with something of Dostoevsky or Camus, or even Victor Hugo.
The then non-professional actor Martin LaSalle was cast by Bresson as Michel, a gloomy young man who spends his days writing his journal in a seedy bedsit: a precursor for the prison cell for which he is destined. (Michel is clearly an ancestor of Paul Schrader’s insomniac malcontents, but with his own monkish austerity.) Michel is plagued with nameless guilt about his elderly, unwell mother whom he cannot bring himself to visit, despite being urged by her young neighbour, Jeanne (Marika Green). His pal Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) tries to set him up with respectable paying jobs, but Michel has become obsessed with the occult thrill of pickpocketing: he broods over a biography of the 18th-century Irish pickpocket-adventurer George Barrington, and meets up with a pickpocketing gang who school him in the sticky-fingered art of unbuckling watches and pinching wallets. They also teach him how to pass the loot from man to man so no one, if spotted, will be found with the goods on him – even temporarily dropping the item into the pocket of another passerby if the heat is on, and then surreptitiously reclaiming it.
But Michel can’t help befriending a cop (Jean Pélégri) and regaling him with his theory of the thief as superman or existentialist hero, the criminal who does not deserve normal punishment. Bresson hired a real pickpocket, Henri Kassagi, to teach the tricks to his cast and play one of the thieves: after the movie Kassagi became a stage conjuror, as he was now too well known to go back to his old trade. Watching Pickpocket again, I saw how Michel in many ways resembles a novitiate priest: troubled, stern, haunted by questions of sin and guilt, as a priest gains access to people’s souls, the thief wants intimate access to their money. And of course, Michel is very like an addicted gambler – Dostoevsky again – and he is gambling his liberty and perhaps his immortal soul.
Who could go back to working for a living after the fierce existential thrill of stealing from someone? After the intimate ecstasy, the almost sensual caress of the fingers inside the stranger’s pocket at the bar, the Métro, the racetrack? Is that why Michel is doing it? Or is stealing from strangers his idea of redemption after the unspeakable shame of stealing from his own mother? Or is he in denial about something that the cop can see: his banality, his inadequacy, all concealed by this tragicomic nonsense about being a criminal “superman”? The balletic stealth of Pickpocket is still compelling.
• Pickpocket is released on 3 June in cinemas.
