Movies about pickpockets8/16/2023 ![]() Much of Pickpocket moves with breathtaking rapidity: characters like Michel's mother, her saintly neighbor Jeanne (the character name isn't exactly subtle), and Michel's friend Jacques are introduced abruptly. The pickpocketing scenes themselves seem minimalist on the surface but are incredibly precise, heightening every onscreen movement with an intensity that foreshadows Bresson's later L'Argent (1983), with its fetishized images of money exchanging hands as though it's a religious rite. Other films might give us backstory about Michel's youth or his failure to assimilate into society, but Pickpocket grants us only Michel's voiceover philosophy about how his superiority over humanity (a flock of sheep who do nothing but work and spend money) makes morality irrelevant to him. We first meet Michel after he's already made the decision to become a pickpocket although the film is structured as his first-person narration delivered through written journal entries (a clear influence on Paul Schrader, in films like Taxi Driver and First Reformed ), he gives us no context as to why he's made this seemingly reckless choice. The concise, elliptical narrative is similarly disorienting. The film is planted firmly within Michel's turbulent mindstate, and the audience identifies intimately with his moral isolation. Instead of seeming like a mistake, this disjuncture between sound and image mirrors the displacement of the main character, Michel (played by the Uruguayan first-time actor Martin La Salle). On teeming streets, only a patter of footsteps is heard amid bustling groups of people, the rustle of fabric as a pocket is picked becomes deafeningly loud. Perhaps more striking is the complex soundtrack: because of the frenetic production, sound was not recorded synchronously, which allows Bresson and his sound designer, Antoine Archimbaud, to craft a hyperintense, not-quite-realistic aural environment. At times, unwitting extras on the streets glance at the camera or the actors, while frequent cutaways to close-ups (of hands reaching into pockets, of characters isolated within throngs of people) emphasize the feeling of alienation in modern urban areas. ![]() ![]() ![]() Pickpocket was written over a period of a few months and filmed relatively quickly in some of Paris' busiest districts (a horse racetrack, the Gare de Lyon rail station), resulting in a chaotic shoot and a disorienting style that is integral to the film's dissociative effect, which makes the viewer firmly aware of the split between mind (or soul) and body. ![]()
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