![]() “Judged how? According to laws? It’s absurd,” he scoffs. What can be said is that lurking behind Michel’s theories of supermen above the rules is resistance to the idea of higher rules, a higher judgment. “You share no interests with others.” Even the experienced thief (sleight-of-hand artist Kassagi) who becomes a mentor to Michel never gets to know him, nor vice versa.ĭoes Michel want to be caught? Does he taunt the inspector because he feels untouchable, or is there another reason? As always, Bresson examines actions but offers little attention to motives, an approach that here seems to suggest that Michel’s choices may be a mystery even to himself, his threadbare theorizing only rationalization. “You’re not in the real world,” Jeanne (Marika Green), a young neighbor of Michel’s mother, tells him. Unlike Fonda’s Wrong Man character, a decent family man whose life and relationships are thrown into upheaval when he is wrongly suspected of a crime, Michel is an isolated loner who holds himself at arm’s length from other people, avoiding contact with others until his life of crime results in someone else making contact with him.Īt least twice in the film Michel fails to recognize people he has met before, a symptom, perhaps, of his inability to engage other people. There’s something else Michel can’t do: make contact with other people. Then they’d stop.” The inspector, though, knows better: Michel can’t stop, until something stops him. Yet he’s not as unusual as he affects to be, judging from the sophistries he exchanges with a police inspector (Jean Pelegri) about “supermen” of such genius and value to society that they are above ordinary rules, and can commit crimes rather than “stagnate.” Uneasily aware of the shabbiness of his position, he adds half-heartedly, “Don’t worry, it would only be at first. By contrast, Pickpocket’s Michel, a bland, lazy intellectual, is an atypical thief, for he tells us in the first lines that those who do such things don’t tell about them, yet he has done them and is telling us. In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda’s a hard-working musician is an everyman, an anybody. In some respects Pickpocket is a mirror image of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. ![]() The enigmatic climax, while more challenging than Bresson’s previous films, anticipates the later, increasingly difficult Bresson of Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette. ![]() Structurally, Pickpocket’s story of a guilty man spending nearly the whole film evading the consequences of his actions is an almost perfect mirror image of the innocent prisoner’s escape efforts in A Man Escaped (there is even an early abortive brush with the law mirroring the early abortive escape attempt in the previous film). The questions become whether this life is indeed self-fulfilling for him, whether the police will eventually catch up with him, and whether he can find anything else in life that he finds just as exhilarating to replace picking pockets.The opening shot, with Michel (Martin La Salle, whose much-noted resemblance to The Wrong Man’s Henry Fonda may have been a factor in his casting) simultaneously writing and narrating his story (or confession), overtly recalls the director’s first distinctively Bressonian masterpiece, Diary of a Country Priest. As he goes about his business, he can spot other pickpockets and although is largely self taught, he does enter into a partnership with two others, one who shows him the tricks of the trade. He also believes the police know about him, but have yet been unable to prove any specific crimes, although he is unaware if they are actively pursuing him, despite frequent encounters with a certain inspector. With no other visible means of income, he believes some people in his life suspects what he does, such as his friend Jacques, while others have no idea, such as his sickly mother, who he loves but does not visit often, perhaps to avoid the obvious questions from her. He justifies his actions using what he is probably aware is a skewed set of morals. ![]() For example, he lives in a one room hovel with only a hook locking the door from inside. He does it through compulsion as he gets a feeling of exhilaration while committing his crimes, rather than for the money in and of itself as he does not spend it on outward material possessions.
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