France, 1959
Directed by Robert Bresson
With Martin LaSalle (Michel), Marika Green (Jeanne), Pierre Leymarie (Jacques), Dolly Scal (the mother), Jean Pélégri (the chief police inspector), Kassagi (the teaching pickpocket), Pierre Etaix (another pickpocket)
The hands are what matters. Lead character Martin LaSalle is introduced while he is writing his memoirs, the camera pointedly focused on the hand holding the fountain pen rushing through the blank page. His life has depended on how deft and nimble and just audacious his hands could be: his is the story of a poor guy learning to be a pickpocket, then becoming a champion in this dubious occupation, and finally falling from a deceptive grace (but only to find a more glorious one).
A stylistic motif has been readily set up: close-ups on these dexterous and dishonest hands regularly crop up, skillfully, as it were, relating the growing confidence, expertise, and nerve of the lead character. This is a highly precise chronicle, especially once Martin LaSalle is noticed by a seasoned pickpocket who decides to teach him all the tricks in the book and to work with him before associating another pickpocket to their petty crimes. The film becomes instantly more than a painstaking observation of criminal gestures: it is a realistic and practical treatise on the art of the pickpocket (complete with literary and historical references, through an old book about an English master of the trade). It delivers a detailed description of crime that is truly remarkable and lifelike (so much that it was banned in Finland for the local authorities feared the film could inspire would-be thieves). Shot in a sober and no-frills way lending even more intensity to the action, “Pickpocket” fits in part the gritty and template of a detective story or a noir.
Police play a big role from the start, as far as Martin LaSalle remembers. Attending in a first flashback a horse racing event he clumsily manages to take a wad of banknotes out of a handbag; but his nervous ways have caught the attention of two inspectors; however, their chief must release from their police station Martin LaSalle as robbery cannot be proved beyond doubt. This chief inspector is going to often meet with the pickpocket; their conversations in a café and elsewhere increasingly look like a cat-and-mouse game, and Martin LaSalle ends up losing his temper, peeved by what he deems a wicked game to put him into a corner – but nothing happens as the chief police inspector remains unable to prove anything.
Martin LaSalle is eventually arrested – but that occurs with another inspector and after a two-year period he spent traveling in Italy and the United Kingdom, stealing to get by, a key part of his life that is put off-screen and just told as the fountain pen keeps scribbling, and an additional, shorter, period of time, which is shot, a matter of few weeks at most, when he behaved as a decent, honest guy, even earning wages.
In fact the talks between the pickpocket and the policeman do not really fit with what could be expected in the genre. This is not like the suspense triggered by a relentless investigation and this does not match the antagonistic and manly mood of a noir. They sustain the film’s wider purpose, to draw closer on the odd personality of Martin LaSalle and to illuminate his quirky motivations. The film does not only analyses the gestures of a thief but also the philosophical and psychological despair tinged with arrogance driving him.
Beyond the debate rising from the blunt philosophy of Martin LaSalle positing that men of a special quality, with genuine talent, could be excused from committing crime if it is the only way to survive in a society overlooking them, the film is the detached and depressing portrait of a helpless man who is failing both on material terms and on moral ones. Living at the top of a building in a single room whose wallpaper is ripped off and stained and whose door cannot be locked up (the camera often insists on this detail that points to an intimacy and a safety effectively out of reach for the downtrodden character), with little furniture and only piles of overused books, Martin LaSalle is an intellectual who just cannot make it, earning nothing from his supposed talents. He feels he has no social obligations and holds no real belief. He has just one friend, Jacques, who is puzzled and sometimes miffed by his mate’s stubborn ways, and one living relative, an old mother who is seriously ill but whom he seldom wants to talk with. And his obsession with being a great pickpocket is just putting him increasingly out of their reach.
To him, crime allows to revolt against fate and to assert a right to exist: it yields a genuine achievement (all those skills that were so hard to master and all that money that had been somehow won), self-justification, and a way to make sense of a life so difficult to live. Hands command and conscience is satisfied. Or is it?
The chief inspector and Jacques are quick to denounce Martin LaSalle’s views on moral grounds, which leaves him unfazed and fails to be more than a theoretical element in the narrative’s dynamics. More shockingly, sentiments seem to be also irrelevant and the death of the mother only means not only that nothing is left as Martin LaSalle emphasizes but also there is nothing to be attached to. But then steps forward a supporting character who looked anecdotal, Jeanne, a neighbor of the mother who looked after her. She is no femme fatale or even a lover riveted by bad guy allure or a desperate soul – this is clearly not a real noir film. Jeanne is quiet, with modest clothes and decent behaviors, struggling to understand Michel LaSalle, becoming deeply horrified as she realizes how dishonest he is. She is also, crucially, a character the pickpocket is not sure how to handle, does not want at first to appreciate, yet feels unable to dismiss.
Slowly the film looks like less a tale of rake’s progress than the observation of a haughty and obstinate man wobbling in the face of a woman standing at the opposite of the cynical and tortured worldview. When he flees to foreign countries, he does not only escape the surveillance of the police but also the ill-defined and pervasive attention of Jeanne. And when he comes back to find she must raise an out-of-wedlock son with no money, abandoned by her lover who was none other than Jacques, he decides to help her and to change his life. The man a clever inspector nabs is actually no longer a professional thief but a reformed criminal foolishly lapsing. On social and moral terms he is getting his comeuppance at long last. But on personal and humanist terms, this is a bitter punishment – and his writings, which have given the film a structure, appear to be his effort to come to terms with his life as it has changed, pointing to his sentiments for Jeanne.
The final shot shows Michel LaSalle and Jeanne kissing despite the huge grille separating the prisoner from the visitor: this time his hands assist the action of his face and the act concurs with the mind, which is no longer theorizing but feeling. Redemption is coming – through his heart and against his mind and hands.
The film, as it first claimed, is arguably not an ordinary detective story. It is the unexpected discovery of love among a drab and wicked world, not really twisting a genre but quietly hijacking it in order to illustrate a psychological drama refusing cinematic conventions: simple and undramatic lines, an interpretation using flat tones of the voice and stiff attitudes to avoid any reference to the habitual, relatable work of actors, and a camerawork remarkably focused on gestures and faces as far as they can reveal the sense of the plot but not with the aim of thrilling or impressing the audience. This is a stern and serious concept that fits with the idealistic quest of the human nature at the core of this surprising pickpocket’s career.