Theft reconnects Michel to the flow of life around him, from which he otherwise feels desperately isolated, and which he perceives as pathetically limited in its possibilities. Michel steals because it is the only act that makes him feel alive in a world becoming dead-not only dead to pleasure and unprogrammed emotions but, as later Bresson would make ever more explicit, organically dead. It’s unlikely that Michel steals because he considers himself a “superman,” in a class of hypothetical extraordinary beings whose unusual gifts place them above the law-though he posits such a theory, abstractly, in his sour, unengaging encounters with the police detective played by Jean Pe?le?gri. His fears are more logistical than spiritual, and also function as aphrodisiacs. Michel is like a man who knows he can cop an orgasm if he manages to be in the right place at the right time and rubs up against the right partner.

But stealing has a specific psychosexual meaning for him, beyond fulfilling the simple need to eat. Les mise?rables, after all, is about a man implacably hounded by the law for stealing a loaf of bread. Often it is necessary, and its drastic punishment is more wicked than the crime. His decision to tempt exposure and shame on a daily basis is a difficult one, but not because he wonders, terrified like Raskolnikov, whether he’s truly capable of it. They are enlarged to epic scale only by his neurasthenic imagination. His crimes never rise above the level of common, small-time transgression. A man commits forbidden acts, gets caught, and goes to prison, where his suffering is ameliorated by the steadfast love of a good woman.īut Pickpocket’s central character, Michel (played by the Uruguayan nonactor Martin LaSalle), with his watery, feebly asserted version of Raskolnikov’s Nietzscheanism, is merely a petty thief, conspicuously lacking the will to monstrosity of Dostoyevsky’s ax murderer. Some of them were plausible, some undoubtedly true, but many just sounded convincing once art becomes a religion, you can say any high-minded nonsense about it with utter impunity.Īs per standard critical note, Pickpocket is obviously “inspired” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Since I hadn’t absorbed the truisms about Bresson that even then encased his work in a gelatin of spiritually heroic cliche?s, I was, after Pickpocket, skeptical about the thematic platitudes critics and film writers routinely and confidently attached to him. (Even on acid, I was never one to enjoy Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens it was also the first movie I saw on LSD. Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films.

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