“Lancelot du Lac” - Robert Bresson (1974)

King Arthur was a legendary Celtic heroic king of the 6th century, but we know him primarily through the Medieval French romantic poets (whose works were then retold in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in the late 15th century). The French works probably represented an amalgamation of various separate romantic traditions, and the separate legend of Sir Lancelot, who was the principal knight of Arthur’s “Knights of the Roundtable” was amalgamated into the Arthurian legend in the 12th century by the French romantic poet Chrétien de Troyes.  Thus despite the Englishness of the Camelot story, the French were major contributors to the legend that we have today.  Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1974) is a further French perspective on this epic tale.

At first thought, one might think that the romantic legend of Sir Lancelot would not be appropriate for Bresson’s unique, Existentialist cinematic style, which tends to distance the protagonist (and correspondingly the viewer) from his or her immediate environment and thereby lead to an internalized perspective.  After all, this story is supposed to be a romance and not the material for a psychologically realistic accounting of what actually might have happened in those days.  Nevertheless, from the opening shots, the viewer is drawn into Bresson’s own distinctive vision of this story, and he works this material to his advantage.

Bresson’s characteristic mise-en-scène, which has been referred to as “transcendental” [1], is, of course, a distinguishing feature of the film, too.  As usual, he uses nonprofessional actors, who read their lines in a flat, unemotional manner.  He did this because he wanted the viewer to mentally construct his or her own diegetic narrative from basic elements, and so Bresson’s cinematic presentation is merely supposed to provide the raw materials for that “bottom-up” construction.   I commented further on this approach in my review of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966):

“Bresson argued that when we experience immediate events in our everyday lives, there is no causality. A causal understanding of experience is only produced later, upon reflection. Bresson wanted the audience to have this direct causal-construction experience with his film narratives, and for this reason he didn’t want his actors (which he preferred to call 'models') to inject their own interpretive causal renderings in their roles. He didn’t want them to 'perform', because this would inevitably lead them to introduce their personal causal interpretations that would disadvantage the constructive experience for the viewer.”

Similarly Bresson tends to avoid establishing shots from an “objective” perspective and instead presents fragmentary, impressionistic static shots of body parts or other objects that reflect mechanical operations.  They are the kinds of odd images that might be stored in one’s memory, like mental snapshots associated with a remembered scene.  This is particularly true in Lancelot du Lac, where the camera frame is often limited to just shots of moving legs in a scene, whether of horses or of people.  Because of these restricted framings, the viewer is acutely aware of action outside the camera frame, and is thus attentive to offscreen sounds.  Bresson accentuates this effect by often amplifying the volume of routine sounds, so that the character of a scene is sometimes more a reflection of the sounds heard than of the visuals depicted.  So in Lancelot du Lac, the sounds of scraping body armor on the part of the knights becomes something of an aural motif for the heavy physicality of the lives of those men, which drastically contrasts with the romantic ideals that they avow.  The dominating sounds of the armor also serves as a kind of further existential isolation of the knights – making them almost prisoners inside their own armored cages.

The film narrative of Lancelot du Lac covers the somber decline-and-fall portion of the Arthurian legend.  Prior to the action of the film, the Knights of the Round Table had gone off in search of the Holy Grail, a sacred vessel associated with the Roman Catholic Holy Communion that was believed to convey magic powers and which was believed to be somewhere in Brittany, France.  This quest for the Grail was a failure, however, and in the process the knights had become quarrelsome and then largely decimated in the process.  The opening shots of the film schematically depict this disastrous degeneration by showing various knights, weighed down by their heavy body armor so that their movements are almost in slow motion, impaling each other with swords and daggers.  The brutality of the slaughter is eerily contrasted by the slow movements of the fighters and lack of human vocal sounds, with only the scraping sounds of the heavy armor audible [2].

The overall story of Lancelot du Lac, can be seen as passing through three progressive stages with respect to the two principal characters, Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.  This narrative also features two principal world viewpoints that are mostly in conflict: love and honor.  For all the other people in Camelot, Lancelot and Guinevere represent the ultimate embodiments of honor.  But they also happen to be deeply in love with each other – a situation that represents dishonor in the eyes of God and of the nobility.  As the story progresses, Lancelot and Guinevere shift their stances in connection with how they understand and relate to both love and honor.

1.  The Return of the Knights

The decimated Knights of the Roundtable, the preeminent member of whom is Lancelot, return from their disastrous quest for the Grail.  Lancelot immediately goes to meet Guinevere in the usual site for their trysts – a hayloft in a forest hut. Lancelot feels that the knights’ failure was God’s punishment for his illicit love affair, and he asks Guinevere to release him from his vow of eternal love for her.  Guinevere refuses.  In fact she chastises Lancelot for his pride in believing that his own actions are responsible for everything: 

“God is not a trophy to bear home. You were implacable. You killed, pillaged, and burned.  Then you turned blindly on each other like maniacs.  Now you blame our love for this disaster.”

Lancelot returns to the company of the other knights and still seeking the honorable path, as well as responding to King Arthur’s command to cultivate friendship among the knights, he tries to befriend his treacherous and jealous rival, Mordred.  But he is rebuffed on this front, too.

The returned knights of Camelot are now idle, and therefore restless, but they are soon enlivened by the prospects of a jousting tournament challenge from the knights of nearby Escalot. 

At the close of this part of the film, Lancelot can be seen to be turning his back on love and is now fully committed to following the path of honor.  Guinevere, on the other hand, is totally at the mercy of her mad love.  She dismisses the “honor” that Lancelot talks about as a fool’s game.  For her love is the highest good. 

2.  The Jousting Tournament

Prior to the tournament Lancelot meets Guinevere again in the hut, and this time begins to fall to temptation.  She says to him, “take this heart”, but he says, “it is your body I want”.  They arrange for a tryst when Lancelot’s spying rivals will be involved in the tournament.

Thus Lancelot announces to the other knights that he will be foregoing the tournament. However, his loyal ally, Sir Gawain, warns him that the other knights are suspicious and gossiping about his rumored adulterous relationship with Guinevere and that he should not be away from the tournament.  So while Guinevere waits with her maids for the tryst, Lancelot decides to forego the tryst and defend his honor.  He participates in the tournament anonymously, by keeping his armored visor down employing unknown battle colors, and in the event,  convincingly defeats all the other knights.  But he is seriously wounded in one jousting encounter, and at the end of the tournament he sneaks away into the forest.

The visual presentation of the tournament, which takes up about ten percent of the film’s running time, is memorably strange: it consists of medium shots focusing on hands and lower body parts, not faces.  These medium and close-shot images alternatively show galloping horses bodies, hands holding lances, and the hands of a ceremonial bagpipe player whose playing initiates a jousting round.  As with other portions of the film, these tight camera shots accentuate the absence of human agency and emphasize brute animalistic and mechanical operations.

Meanwhile Guinevere has been waiting in vain for Lancelot in the hut hayloft.  Gawain goes to inform her of Mordred’s spying, but she dismisses the warning and affirms her faith in her love for Lancelot.  She defiantly tells Gawain to inform Arthur that she loves only Lancelot and belongs to him now and that she will remain waiting for Lancelot in the hut.

By the close of this second section of the film, Lancelot’s love for Guinevere has taken possession of him again, but he is attempting to retain his honor, too.  Guinevere continues only to follow her heart.

3.  The Downfall
Though still wounded, Lancelot rushes back in the evening to rescue Guinevere, whose hut is surrounded by Lancelot’s opponents.  In the process of getting to the hut, Lancelot slays three knights who are there to protect the “honor” of the queen.  When he meets Guinevere, though, he finds her disconsolate over all the bloodshed and resigned to the impossibility of their love in this world.  But Lancelot is now fully committed to love and says, “I crave the impossible”; he refuses to let her go.  Hoping to avoid further blood, King Arthur offers to take back Guinevere peacefully and let Lancelot depart the kingdom.  With great reluctance Lancelot finally accedes to Guinevere’s wishes and returns her to Arthur. 

So this section of the film has seen both Lancelot and Guinevere abandon their hearts’ desires and succumb to the demands of  socially-defined morality and honor.

News now arrives that Mordred has stayed behind at the castle and organized a rebellion against Arthur.  Lancelot unquestioningly asserts his loyalty to the king and rushes back to Camelot in defense of Arthur.  But on the way back to the castle, Arthur, Lancelot, and all their knights are ambushed by archers hiding in the forest trees.  One by one they are all killed.

This abrupt ending to the film leaves both the quests for love and honor in ruins, literally.  The chivalric devotion to honor is exposed here as little more than superstition, which is still dominant in this culture, as exemplified by the knights sometimes gazing at the moon looking for favorable omens.  And they vow to uphold honor, even when they don’t seem to understand it.  For example, Lancelot’s loyal ally, Gawain, vainly attempts to kill Lancelot not for what he believes in, but because he feels forced by honor traditions to avenge his brother’s death.  In fact the idea of having honor seems to be associated with gaining some sort of special power that gives one a competitive advantage – just like the possession of the Holy Grail was believed to give special powers to is possessor.  So the honor system seems to be little more than a superstitious set of beliefs that command rigid adherence.  It is not surprising that their illogicality makes them susceptible for manipulation – thus Mordred invokes honor in order to undermine Lancelot and attack Arthur.

Similarly love is presented in the film as more of a blind passion than as a union of souls.  Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Bresson is here more accommodating to the notion of romantic love than he is in some of his earlier films, where love is often seen as a delirium that is entirely internal to the lover and has no existence outside the scope of the individual.

In parallel to the contrast between love and honor stands the character contrast between Lancelot and Guinevere.  Lancelot stands for honor and principle.  To stand for honor implies that honor can be achieved by an act of will, and Lancelot is the supreme exemplar of this notion, since he feels that he can accomplish anything, particularly honor and merit, if he so decides.  As a consequence Lancelot is the ultimate individualist, isolated and in struggle with the world around him.  Guinevere, on the other hand, is more organically embedded into her world.  She is thus a fatalist who recognizes her inability to stand up against the forces of her own passion or those of her external surroundings.

What ultimately weights on and lingers with the viewer is the heavy physicality of those external surroundings.   In fact one might speculate that perhaps Bresson’s cinematic presentation captures more of the psychological reality of existence in those times than do more conventional presentations of the Arthurian legend, such as John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981).  Bresson’s presentation in Lancelot du Lac emphasizes the limited and constrained horizons of all the individuals.  They are surrounded by dark forests, castle walls, and the small confines of rooms and huts.  And they are further constrained by the physical burden of managing/manipulating their horses, their armor, their weapons, etc.  These are isolated individuals, equipped with heavy weapons in order to fight their individual battles.  When at the end they are confronted with an organized, semi-mechanized battle force of archers, they are no match for that kind of collective organization. So the individuals in the story are defeated by their isolation and their naive belief in their personal efficacy.  Individual heroism is no match for cooperation.  

In this environment of darkness and  restricted horizons, the people  capable of feeling empathy (and love) – Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Gawain – are those we  admire, even though they are doomed to be crushed by blind forces of animality.  They do generally adhere to the injunctions of the honor codes of their day that overly celebrate individual merit, but they are also responsive to the more subtle dimensions of human love and feeling. 

As with Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, Bresson is again pessimistic about the prospects of making genuine, empathic human engagement.  But in Lancelot du Lac he portrays people who did manage, at least for awhile, to make that interpersonal connection.

★★★½
                       
Notes:

1. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, University of California Press (1972).  For further discussion of Bresson’s style, see also my reviews of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967).
2. Although 6th century Celts may have had chainmail armor, they probably didn’t have the plated armor shown here, which is more characteristic of the medieval period of the later French romantic poets.

“Mouchette” - Robert Bresson (1967)

Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) tells the sad story of a disadvantaged and friendless teenage girl in rural France. Usually there was a hiatus of several years between Bresson’s productions, but Mouchette was filmed immediately after his Au Hasard Balthazar and features some common elements and themes with that film. Both depict ill-fated girls living a tormented life in rural French society, which itself is portrayed as violent, mean spirited, and alcohol besotted. Because of these thematic commonalities, the two films are often paired by critics and held in mutually high esteem by Bresson’s admirers. There is one striking difference between the two, however. While Au Hasard Balthazar was, unusually for Bresson’, based on his own script, Mouchette was adapted from an existing text – in this case a novella by Georges Bernanos, another of whose works had served as the basis for Bresson’s masterful Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un Curé de Campagne, 1950). But apart from the nature of authorship, there are other distinctions and points of comparison between Mouchette and Au Hasard Balthazar, as I will elaborate further.

Bresson’s films have been considered to be spiritual, or even religious, and certainly his films reveal the influence of his Jansenist Roman Catholic upbringing. But I would argue that they are not so explicitly religious, although they do evoke the fundamental Existentialist issues that are invariably addressed by religions and theological schools. After all, Bresson characterised himself as an agnostic, so we should not really expect him to be completely obsessed by religious schema. Perhaps it is best to fall back to the term, ‘transcendental”, which Paul Schrader used to characterize Bresson’s work. In any case Mouchette represents a further progression in Bresson’s movement towards a pessimistic view of human nature and the prospects of redemption. Whereas redemption was at least held as possible in Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped (1956), and Pickpocket (1959), when we proceed further and get to The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), the possibilities of redemption seem, at best, only subjective. Finally with Mouchette, the picture moves even further away from contemplative melancholy and closer to complete despair. In spite of its gloomy outlook, however, Mouchette was named in a 1972 poll conducted by Sight and Sound magazine to be among the top twenty greatest movies ever made.

By the time of the making of this film, Bresson’s cinematic aesthetics were famously austere, even severe. He restricted himself to nonprofessional actors, who were instructed to read their lines in a flat, automatic fashion, without the slightest trace of theatrical interpretation. This was done in order to present the cinematic viewing experience as something original, rather than as a photographed version of some narrative that had been situated in another form of expression, such as a novel or a play. As I remarked in my review of Balthazar,

. . . Bresson always forces the viewer to construct his own, individual diegesis. Bresson argued that when we experience immediate events in our everyday lives, there is no causality. A causal understanding of experience is only produced later, upon reflection. Bresson wanted the audience to have this direct causal-construction experience with his film narratives, and for this reason he didn’t want his actors (which he preferred to call “models”) to inject their own interpretive causal renderings in their roles. He didn’t want them to “perform”, because this would inevitably lead them to introduce their personal causal interpretations that would disadvantage the constructive experience for the viewer. It is for this reason that he insisted on those flat performances of his models, with downcast eyes that disconnected the players from each other. As a consequence, each viewer of a Bresson film will have to construct his or her diegetic interpretation purely within the framework of his or her own experiences.

It follows then that the viewer often sees events in Bresson’s films in something of a reverse order: first the events depicting an effect are shown, and then the events that provide a causal explanation of that effect are shown moments later. Events presented this way can place the viewer into a mode of existential experience aligned with the film’s protagonist. In the case of Mouchette, Bresson’s concern with aspects of causality is a key issue, since the causal motivations of Mouchette’s final actions are open to our interpretation and somewhat problematic.

The story of the film, which proceeds through four main sections, is covered in some detail, because a number of elements accumulate to create the overall theme.

I. Setting the Scene (11 minutes). This comprises four disconnected scenes that separately introduce the principal characters, whose identities and relationships will be revealed gradually.

1. A lone woman laments her declining condition, saying, “what will become of them without me”. After she leaves, the camera remains fixed on her empty chair, thereby establishing the visual motif of absence and isolation that will dominate the film.
2. A game warden in the forest eyes a poacher snaring birds. Filmed almost exclusively in closeups, the scene compels the viewer to patch together the images and to try and make the connections.
3. The game warden walks back into town and passes some girls on their way to school. One of the girls in the foreground hears her name called, “Mouchette”.
4. The game warden, Mathieu, goes to a tavern and earnestly propositions the barmaid, Louisa, but she seems indifferent. Then two bootleggers unload a truck full of whiskey crates and deliver them to the tavern. After downing shots of whiskey, they drive home, where Mouchette is attending her sick mother (the woman seen initially).

II. Romantic Frustrations (16 minutes). The next day in school, Mouchette, with shabby old clothes and clunky wooden clogs, is harshly scolded by her teacher for not conforming with the class group singing activity. After school, Mouchette hides near the road and flings mud at her better-dressed classmates. Then on her way home, a village boy attempts to humiliate the friendless girl by brazenly exposing himself to her. Later, on Sunday after attending church, the villagers go to the tavern, where Mouchette works helping the bar made, Louisa. Afterwards, Mouchette wanders over to the town fair and wistfully stares at the bumper-car ride concession. A passing lady gives Mouchette coins needed to go for a ride, and she quickly joins in the fun, soon engaging in a flirtatious bumping rivalry with a well-dressed village boy in another bumper car. But after the conclusion of the ride when she timidly approaches the boy, her father comes over and rudely slaps her in the face for being a hussy, reducing the poor girl to tears. Louisa then comes to the fair with the poacher, Arsene, and they get on another concession ride together, much to the jealous consternation of the onlooking Mathieu.

III. Mouchette’s Night Out (26 minutes). The next day, Mouchette is back to flinging mud at her classmates again after school. But the other schoolgirls just ignore the abuse and ride away with their boyfriends on their motor scooters, while Mouchette looks on enviously. She runs off into the nearby forest, but she gets caught in a sudden rainstorm and hides under a tree to wait it out. When the rain finally stops, it is already dark, but as she starts to walk home, she hides when she sees the gun-wielding Mathieu in search of the poacher Arsene. We then follow Mathieu, who finds and confronts Arsene. But after an initial fistfight, they fall to the ground and are soon laughing and drinking whiskey together like old comrades. Somwhat later, Arsene finds Mouchette hiding and takes her to his hut in the woods so that they can take shelter from what he calls the “cyclone”. There he confides to her that he thinks he may have killed Mathieu and demands that she testify to a false alibi that would cover him should the police question her. Wanting to remove evidence that he was in the forest that night, Arsene then takes her to the village tavern and breaks into the back room. But shortly after entering the room Arsene falls into a frightening epileptic seizure and starts thrashing on the floor. Mouchette, moved by his suffering, holds him still and then tenderly sings her school song to him as he gradually comes to. But when Arsene completely regains consciousness, he has forgotten about his confession and Mouchette’s assurances of loyalty, and so he tries to prevent her from leaving the hut to go home. Eventually he overpowers her and rapes her, and she ultimately submits.

IV. No Way Out (27 minutes). Mouchette eventually escapes from the tavern and returns home early in the morning. In a short space of time she then has a series of dispiriting experiences:

1. In a daze and crying from her harrowing experience, she tries to look after the baby for her helplessly ill mother. But her mother soon succumbs to her illness and dies.
2. The next morning Mouchette goes out to get milk for the baby. A grocery store lady expresses her sympathies to Mouchette concerning her mother and offers the girl chocolate. But when she sees some scratches on Mouchett’e neck, the woman rudely calls her a slut.
3. On the way back to her home, Mouchette passes by the gamekeeper’s house and sees that he is perfectly OK – Arsene’s story of having killed the gamekeeper was illusory. The gamekeeper and his wife accuse Mouchette of carousing with Arsene and harshly question her, but Mouchette defiantly tells them that in fact she loves Arsene.
4. As Mouchette walks home, a wealthy old lady invites her inside and gives her a shroud and some dresses. But the woman’s age and incessant talk about death only put off Mouchette, and she rebelliously whispers under her breath, “you disgusting old thing”.
5. Continuing home Mouchette walks past the forest again, where men are shooting rabbits. Seeing a rabbit shot by the “sportsmen”, she rushes over to watch it in its death throes.
6. After these experiences, Mouchette walks over to a pond and sits near the bank. She holds up one of the dresses that the old lady had given to her, but it tears on a branch. Apparently distraught over the spoiling of her one nice possession, she puts the torn dress over her and rolls down the hill towards the pond, perhaps merely to complete the ruination of the dress. When she sits up, she sees a tractor in the distance and calls out to it, but although the driver stares back, he does not respond. She goes back to rolling down the bank again, but now with the intent of rolling all the way into the pond. On her second attempt her suicidal act is successful, and the camera remains focused on the pond.

When we compare Mouchette to Au Hasard Balthazar, it can be seen that despite some common elements, there are also very marked differences. In fact one might speculate that Mouchette was conceived to overcome a deficiency that was present in that immediately preceding film of Bresson’s. In Au Hasard Balthazar, there was no observable, or even possible, justification or motivation for Marie’s slavish love for the thug, Gerard. There was no hint of a comprehensible human relationship. This prevented the viewer from engaging in any existential empathy with Marie (and of course, such empathy was equally impossible for the innocent, but opaque, donkey, Balthazar). Both Marie and Balthazar may have engaged our sympathies, but not our empathy. But in Mouchette the situation is somewhat different. Even though the hopes for meaningful personal relationships are ultimately frustrated, at least the quest for genuine human engagement is observable and once or twice seems possible. This is highlighted by the brief moment of tenderness that Mouchette feels for Arsene after his epileptic fit – one of the most intimate and touching moments in the entire Bressonian canon.

In fact the quest for a meaningful relationship that would establish her identity (to herself) is what underlies the film. As Bernanos and Bresson knew well, we understand ourselves in terms of our meaningful relationships with others. Mouchette is seen throughout as an “unperson” who is completely isolated from the village and not recognized as a normal human being. Her father brutalizes her; her classmates ignore her; and the village boys mock her. Throughout the film she tries the little acts of rebellion common to all children that represent minimal assertions of selfhood. She mischievously spills milk when serving her family coffee. She intentionally sings off key in her classroom. She stomps her Sunday shoes in the mud. And she scrapes her muddy shoes on the old lady’s nice carpet. These minor misdemeanors are indicative of her limited opportunities for free expression and action. Apart from her mother, there is only one person who treats her like a human being, and that is Arsene. That is why she swears that she would die for him and why she defends him to the gamekeeper even after he raped her.

But the adult world, dominated as it is by artefacts, machines, and mechanical manipulation, seems to offer her no opportunities for a self-defining human relationship. This is symbolized by both the sound of intrusively noisy trucks incessantly passing by her apartment and the boys’ motor scooters that whisk away Mouchette’s classmates. Mouchette’s one opportunity to experience this mechanical world – when she rode the bumper cars – was only a fantasy that ended in pain and humliation. Her alcohol-fueled father holds his cap and pretends he is driving his truck when he falls drunkenly into bed: mechanical control is what dominates his dreams. They all have their contraptions: her father has his truck, Mathieu and the rabbit shooters have their guns, and Arsene has his animal trap. In fact, the adult world is so artificial and schematic that, as far as Mouchette is concerned, there is a sense of unreality to it. What is real, and what is not? When Arsene and Mathieu appear to be fighting to the death in the forest, they suddenly and mysteriously start laughing and drinking together. Arsene tells Mouchette that the storm was a “cyclone”, but the next day her mother, whom she trusts, tells her that there wasn’t one. Arsene tells her that he killed Mathieu, and the next day she sees Mathieu perfectly unharmed. Was all her suffering on behalf of Arsene just a dream? After seeing her mother die in suffering and the innocent rabbit blown apart by the hunters’ rifle shots, life itself must have been held in question.

Thus Mouchette is very much an existentialist tale of loneliness and isolation, while Au Hasard Balthazar is more of an expressionistic nightmare of pure suffering. Mouchette was impaired, however, by the progressive austerity of Bresson’s now-rigid mise en scène. This is exemplified in Bresson’s differing adaptaions of the two texts by Bernanos. As literary works, both Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, and his Mouchette were told as first-person French histoires. Bresson’s earlier filming Diary of a Country Priest was faithful to Bernanos’s first-person narrative, and the result was brilliant. But by the time of the filming of Mouchette, Bresson eschewed such causation-infected narrative contrivances, to the detriment of the viewing experience. This degree of aesthetic self-discipline on the part of Bresson distances the viewer from the character of Mouchette and enervates the power of the story. Although Mouchette may be more sophisticated and more profound, Au Hasard Balthazar is more powerful.

In the last analysis, one might ask whether Mouchette was devoid of any hope at all. That final calling out to the tractor driver on the part of Mouchette in the film is reminiscent of Joseph K’s final, hopeful glance up to the lighted window in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. This was one last appeal for a meaningful interaction. Something more than the cold stare that Mouchette received might have saved her life. But those life-saving “something more” gestures are all-too rare in this world.
★★★

“Au Hasard Balthazar” - Robert Bresson (1966)

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), written and directed by Robert Bresson, is an unusually paradoxical film, even for this director. On the one hand, Bresson enthusiasts often rate it as his greatest and most moving work. But on the other hand, interpretations of the film, when they are forthcoming at all, are varied and inconsistent. There is little common ground concerning what the film means and why one might be disposed to like it. The story follows the troubled life, from birth to death, of a donkey, named “Balthazar”, whose fateful circumstances crisscross with those of a young girl, Marie, who occasionally attends to him. The French title of the film might be translated to mean “The Misadventures of Balthazar”, or more loosely, “The Random Fate of Balthazar”. It recalls the French title of Bresson’s greatest film, “A Man Escaped, or the Wind Bloweth Where it Listeth” and emphasizes how we are all subject to the arbitrary machinations of events in the world that are (almost) completely beyond our control. But this film reflects Bresson’s increasingly pessimistic view of human weakness and failure.

The story is told in Bresson’s familiar ascetic and progressively more mannered presentation style. This included the use of nonprofessional actors, who were instructed to read their lines in a flat, unemotional style that disconnects from any narrative continuity. Bresson often drew his actors from intellectual circles, however. Anne Wiazemsky, who plays the role of Marie, was the granddaughter of Francois Mauriac, and later, after marrying Jean-Luc Godard and appearing in several French New Wave films, became a successful novelist. Pierre Klossowski, who plays the miserly miller in the film, was a well-known French novelist and brother of famous French artist Balthasar [!] Klossowski de Rola.

Bresson provides no backstory information about the characters and avoids any establishing shots that can contextualise a given scene. The narrative continuity may have been further compromised in this instance by the fact that this is one of the few times Bresson did not base his script on an existing written story or text; apparently it is entirely his own construction. There is a characteristic, almost obsessive, focus on closeups of hands and feet (these often introduce a scene) in the act of some mundane movement or operation. The closeups remind us of the key, interactive nature of existence – it is primarily through our hands and feet that we interact with the world, and these interactions are more fundamental and primitive than our artificially constructed mental reflections. In addition, the sound features highly articulated individual sounds, often of activities taking place offscreen. The overall effect gives rise to the characteristic Bressonian mise en scène: that of a dreamlike collection of generally dissatisfied souls who are cut off from fulfilment or genuine community. The narrative proceeds through five phases, although the boundaries between these phases are indistinct:

1. Introduction. This brief section moves astonishing quickly. The young children of a French farmer convince their father to keep a donkey that has just been born, and they name him “Balthazar”, after one of the Three Wise Men. The children and the donkey have an idyllic existence flooded with affection, including a blooming childhood love between the farmer’s son, Jacques, and Marie, who is the daughter of a schoolteacher. But the death of one of the farmer’s daughters causes their family to move to the city, and Jacques and Marie are separated. All of this takes place in just six and half minutes.
2. Gerard. Roughly ten years have now gone by, and Balthazar has been sold and turned into a draught animal. After a road accident enables Balthazar to escape from his cruel owner, he finds his way back to the old farm, which is now tended by Marie’s father, who is trying make a go of it as a farmer. Marie is now a pretty young women, and she attracts the attention of the local hood, Gerard, whose sole interest seems to be wanton destructiveness. Jacques, now grown into a honorable young gentleman, returns for a visit and expresses his continued interest in Marie, but she prefers the reckless and abusive Gerard. Soon she is Gerard’s sexual slave, receiving no tenderness from him in return. After economic and legal disasters ruin Marie’s vane father, Balthazar is sold to a baker, who employs Gerard for bread deliveries. Gerard demonstrates his continuing evil nature by whipping and abusing Balthazar at every chance, stealing from the baker’s cash drawer, and making the baker’s wife his sexual slave, too.
3. Arnold. In connection with the investigation into a local murder, the plice question Gerard and his gang, along with a local impoverished drunkard, Arnold, who is a simple fool when sober, but becomes violent and destructive when inebriated. Arnold gains possession of the now-ill Balthazar just before the baker was about to “put him away”, and after restoring Balthazr to health uses the donkey for odd jobs. But life isn’t all that good for Arnold and Balthazar. Arnold is routinely the soft target of Gerard’s thuggery, and whenever Arnold is drunk, he cruelly beats his beleaguered donkey. Eventually Arnold comes upon an inheritance and celebrates with a party at an inn, but Gerard and his hoods come and trash the place and then ply Arnold with so much alcohol that he later falls to his death on the road. Balthazar is then sold by the police at auction to a miller in town.
4. The Miller. The miller harnesses Balthazar to walk in circles turning his mill while relentlessly whipping him. After sleeping with Marie, who has been abandoned by Gerard and reduced to being a homeless prostitute, the miller returns Balthazar to Marie’s family, who have come to take Marie back home.
5. Final Fall. At this point some hope for salvation appears. Marie and Jacques are back home, and Jacques returns from the city to press his romantic case once more. But Marie spurns his love and rushes off to Gerard’s cottage, where she is gang-rapped and abandoned again. Marie then runs away, forever it is assumed, and her prideful father, frustrated by all his humiliating failures, dies of grief. Gerard comes to steal Balthazar for a smuggling operation near the border, and in the event, Balthazar is shot and dies. The closing shot has the dying Balthazar wandering into a meadow where a flock of sheep surround him. He lies down in the grass and slowly passes away as the recurring musical theme of Schubert’s mournful piano Sonata in A Major is played on the soundtrack

Many critics and viewers have found Au Hasard Balthazar to be a spiritually transcendent, even uplifting, tale that evokes a higher plane of reality – one of peace that lies above the cruel dimensions of this material world. Indeed many have found the film to be explicitly laden with Christian symbols of sacrifice, as Balthazar, the Christ figure, is subjected to the seven deadly sins of man. Critic James Quandt nicely summarizes these tendencies towards Christian symbolism:

A common reading of Balthazar, relying on an orthodox sense of Bresson’s Catholicism, on the Palm Sunday imagery of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on “the foal of a donkey,” . . . ascribes to the animal a Christlike status. In this schema, Balthazar, after enjoying a brief, paradisal childhood, apparent in the image of his nuzzling his mother’s milk that opens the film and his playful baptism by three children, lives a calvary. Passed from cruel master to cruel master, Balthazar traverses the stations of the cross, beaten, whipped, slapped, burned, mocked, and, in the concluding crucifixion, shot and abandoned to bleed to death, the hillside on which he perishes a modern-day Golgotha. That he dies literally burdened (with contraband) suggests, in this reading, a sacrifice for humanity. This meaning is intensified by Balthazar’s sole, stigmata-like wound and by the sheep that flow around him, a tide of white that surrounds his dark, prostrate form. With their tolling bells, they evoke the Agnus Dei [Lamb of God] and thereby the liturgy, “Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis [who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us].” Balthazar has died for the sins of those who have transgressed against him—the alcoholic Arnold, the vicious Gérard, the mean, miserly merchant—and of the few who have not, particularly the martyred Marie, whose fate parallels his.

This interpretation is tempting in its simplicity. That Balthazar passes through the hands of seven masters suggests to some a numerical trace of the seven words from the cross, the seven sacraments of the church formed by Christ’s Passion, or the seven deadly sins. The mock baptism performed by the children and the auditory equation of church bells with Balthazar’s bell indicate the animal’s divinity; Marie’s name suggests the mother of God, and the garland of flowers she makes for Balthazar is reminiscent of Christ’s crown of thorns; the strange bestiary in the circus implies the ark; the smugglers’ gold and perfume are the equivalent of the offerings of the magi; Gérard’s band of blousons noirs [black jackets] represent Christ’s tormentors (or, as Gilles Jacob has suggested, the thieves of Ecclesiastes); the wine that Arnold drinks and the bread that Gérard delivers both suggest transubstantiation; Arnold is in many ways a Judas figure; and so on.
— James Quandt, "Au Hasard Balthazar", The Criterion Collection, 2005.

My own response to the film, though, lies in a rather different direction. In this connection it is useful to remember that Bresson always forces the viewer to construct his own, individual diegesis. Bresson argued that when we experience immediate events in our everyday lives, there is no causality. A causal understanding of experience is only produced later, upon reflection. Bresson wanted the audience to have this direct causal-construction experience with his film narratives, and for this reason he didn’t want his actors (which he preferred to call “models”) to inject their own interpretive causal renderings in their roles. He didn’t want them to “perform”, because this would inevitably lead them to introduce their personal causal interpretations that would disadvantage the constructive experience for the viewer. It is for this reason that he insisted on those flat performances of his models, with downcast eyes that disconnected the players from each other. As a consequence, each viewer of a Bresson film will construct his diegetic interpretation within the framework of his or her own experiences. For someone steeped in Catholic symbolism, perhaps the account outlined by Quandt would make sense. But I think Bresson’s film is both more profound and more ambiguous than that account.

The donkey Balthazar is a sentient being, but when we look into his expressionless eyes, we don’t have any understanding of who or what he is. His vocabulary is limited to braying when he suffers: all we are aware of his suffering, but the rest is obscure. Yet throughout the film he is held by various characters in the film to be hard worker, a loving being, a fool, a genius (he can perform multiplications on multi-digit numbers), and even a saint. They look into his eyes and attribute these things to him based on the schemas that underlie their own mental frameworks. All of these frameworks are symbol-based and dualistic – they can never capture the raw passionate nature of existence, since that existence is beyond essence and explanation. In Dostoyevky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin remarks that he was cured of his melancholy one day in Switzerland when he heard the braying of a donkey in the marketplace. Bresson has remarked that his Balthazar was inspired by that very passage. This contrast between rationalized mental schemes and pure existence is highlighted during the opening titles when Schubert’s contemplative piano theme is interrupted and overtaken by the persistent loud braying of Balthazar. The discordant braying of the donkey is pure passion, with no further comprehensible semantics. For the remainder of the film, we will see men and women who apply their own prejudices, whether benign or malicious, on this poor animal who watches and suffers. Certainly Balthazar is not a true saint: whatever virtue he might have is merely the absence of malice. It is Marie’s mother who sees his stoic suffering as saintly. But Balthazar is the perfect Bressonian “model”, because he is completely “causeless”. We and the characters in the film are responsible for how we see him.

The contrast between the paltry schemes concocted by mental reflection and the wonder of pure existence is a continuing theme of Bresson’s work. His vision here, though, is relatively one-sided, focusing more on the abject state of man than on the glorious possibilities of existence. A recurring iconic motif in this film for man’s limited and exploitative condition is modern gadgetry – motorcycles, automobiles, transistor radios. These are all things that rudely intrude on the natural space of the French countryside and have no natural place there. Thus Gerard, the epitome of inhumanity, is constantly seen with these mean and noisy devices. In fact many of the characters in the film have such a blinkered view of life that they are dominated by a single perspective:

• Marie’s Father: Honour – He sacrifices his living and family, and ultimately his life, in order to spurn those he feels have made him lose face.
• The Miller: Money – He says he loves only money and adds that once you have that “you quickly learn that you do what you want and still command respect.”
• Gerard: Property – His only interest seems to be the possession of exploitable property and the reduction of people and animals to that same status.
• Marie’s Mother: God – She sees the suffering, innocent animal, Balthazar as a saint, mirroring her own feeling of martyrdom.

The drunkard Arnold is a special case. He oscillates between passive tolerance and drunken rage. At the end of the film, he pitifully bids farewell to the world by addressing a telephone pole and road marker, material artifacts from his life on the road that seem to represent his only “friends”.

There are some significant aspects of Au Hasard Balthazar that do not seem to fit comfortably in Bresson’s aesthetics. By and large Bresson’s characters, his models, are presented as isolated from the world around them. In this world of mutually isolated characters, we are reminded of our own existential loneliness. But in Au Hasard Balthazar there is a greater degree of social interaction than in his preceding films, and this is a bit problematic. In particular, the portrayal in the film of Marie’s love for Gerard does not seem plausible. Most critics have ignored this aspect of the story, but it is a significant and emphatically proclaimed element. Marie says to her mother, “Do we know why we love someone? If he says, ‘come’, I come.” She goes on to add, “I’d kill myself for him.” This level of passion for another person is completely unmotivated in the film and seems so absurd that the viewer is tempted to dismiss Marie at that point. Whereas Bresson was able to portray romantic passion in his earlier Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1944), his film aesthetic had evolved to such an austerity twenty years later that romantic passion could not be accommodated within it.

In fact a prominent and disturbing theme in the film is the self-destructiveness of Marie, her father, and Arnold, which is brought about by their separate withdrawals from human affairs and their refusal to take defensive action. This converts an existential loneliness into an expressionistic nightmare. Marie’s father stubbornly refuses to defend himself because of his ego. Marie ruins herself, because she seems to want to abolish her ego and become the slave of Gerard. Arnold swings wildly between overweening ego (when drunk) and egolessness (when sober). When they each abandon their will to take action, they become the subjects of cruel dominators, just like Balthazar (who, unlike his human fellows, has no choice in the matter).

What we have in Au Hasard Balthazar, then, is a presentation of the deadening and demeaning existence of French peasants, but no contrasting moments of life-giving affirmation and exhilaration. The closest we come to it is the serene embrace that Marie gives to Balthazar when she is reunited with him as a teenager. But even this moment is more one of innocence than of love. Bresson’s vision is relentlessly pessimistic here. In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, there is a final moment of romantic salvation, In Diary of a Country Priest (1950), the protagonist dies with an unfilfilled longing, but at least he is transfigured by the wonder of existence. In A Man Escaped (1956), although the “wind bloweth where it listeth”, the protagonist perseveres and escapes. In Pickpocket (1959), the protagonist, after “the strange path [he] had to take”, finally succumbs to the salvation of love. In The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), the protagonist dies at the stake, but is still unbowed and profoundly innocent. But in Au Hasard Balthazar, there is no seeker (other than the secondary character Jacques), no salvation, no redemption, only suffering. Marie is ruined and even abandoned by the narrative. Balthazar is killed by a random bullet. There is no suggestion that either one of them has ever suspected the possibility of, much less found, any real sublimity. The progression of Bresson's pessimism continued with Mouchette [1].

The final scene of Balthazar dying in the meadow is undeniably moving, but it elicits different reactions. Some critics find the scene uplifting. To me it was unutterably sad. Balthazar suffered a life of meaningless torment and then finally slumps down in the grass to pass away. The sheep that surround him are also part of the great cycle of nature and have no communion with Balthazar. The lambs that are seen suckling at their mothers’ sides will never reach maturity – they are doomed to be slaughtered within the year and served as meat to their human masters. We watch the simple scene in the meadow, we see the inevitability of lonely death, and we listen to the quiet, melancholy strains of Schubert’s Sonata in A Major.
★★★½

Notes:

1. My review of Mouchette discusses some of the thematic similarities and contrasts between Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette.

"The Trial of Joan of Arc" - Robert Bresson (1962)

The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc, 1962) by Robert Bresson tells the story of Joan of Arc during the final period of her captivity and her execution in 1431. Like all of Bresson’s films, there is no backstory provided concerning significant background information of the characters, but in this case, one is scarcely necessary. The amazing story of the “Maid of Orleans” is well known. Joan, an illiterate 17-year-old peasant girl, approached the besieged French military forces during the Hundred Years War and swore that voices from God and His messengers had commanded her to help the French army drive the English from French soil. She was given command and proceeded to lead her forces to a string of stunning victories over the English that reversed the course of the war. However, she was captured in action by the French Burgundian allies of the English in 1430 near Compiègne and eventually turned over to the English military authorities in Rouen. There she was placed on trial for heresy before a Roman Catholic Church court made up mostly of clerics sympathetic to the English cause. It is this trial that comprises the story of Bresson’s film.

Bresson’s sources for this work came exclusively from the court records of her trial for heresy in 1431 and from depositions from eyewitnesses to her subsequent execution taken at her retrial twenty five years later. It is remarkable how complete these records are, and they have fascinated scholars ever since. Although many films have been made about Joan of Arc, it is notable that Carl Dreyer’s legendary silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, 1928) also relied on these same records, so it is worthwhile to contrast the two works.

Basing a film script entirely and strictly on court testimony presents a severe challenge to a silent filmmaker, and it is remarkable how successful Dreyer actually was at telling his story in silent fashion. True, there are key intertitles in Dreyer’s film that explicitly state some crucial exchanges in the trial, but much of the narrative is conveyed by means of the dramatic countenances and facial expressions of the court participants, particularly those of Joan. Bresson, with the advantage of a sound track at his disposal, takes a completely opposite approach. For him, the sound track is everything, and the visual images in this film are only supposed to accompany the words. This advantage is important here, because Bresson’s extensive and meticulous coverage of the trial cross-examinations and Joan’s surprisingly precise responses offer more valuable information about both the disputatious dialectics of the trial and the intuitive nature of Joan’s mental framework.

Of course, Bresson’s stylistic choices in this film must be seen in the light of his characteristic aesthetic style, which had developed over the course of his preceding films: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1944), Diary of a Country Priest” (1950), A Man Escaped” (1956), and Pickpocket (1959). By now Bresson’s pattern was set. He would always use unprofessional actors (his “models”) with no previous acting experience, who would be instructed to render “flat” performances and show almost no emotion when they read their lines, often with downcast glances. He would also typically avoid scene establishing shots (as did Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc), concentrating instead mainly on medium and close shots and often focusing on the slow deliberate motion of hands and feet. This approach contributes here to the feelings of confinement and claustrophobia (and even paranoia) that effectively evoke the stressful circumstances of imprisonment.

Also like Dreyer’s film, but achieved by slightly different means, the viewer sympathizes with Joan, but doesn’t completely identify with her – one doesn’t “get inside” her consciousness and see things from her perspective. Instead, we see things from a greater distance. This is the dreamlike nature of Bresson’s film narratives, which have their undeniable power in evoking a subconscious feeling of disturbed wonder.

But there is another stylistic element in The Trial of Joan of Arc that is distinct from Bresson’s earlier films, particularly Pickpocket. In Pickpocket, there seemed to be frequently unmotivated pauses separating the individual statements in conversations. The speech in that film did not flow the way we would expect in spontaneously motivated interactions. There were also scenes that would start with just am empty, static view of a room or a doorway for several seconds – prior to the appearance of any agency of action. Or, there would be the final moments of camera shots, after a player had departed from the scene, but with the camera lingering for several seconds on a now-empty environment. These pauses seemed awkward, but they would pull the viewer out of the involved flow of the action and into reflection. Such pauses are not present in The Trial of Joan of Arc. Instead, we have just the opposite – a rapid-fire exchange of verbal statements that come so quickly and unnaturally that they seem not to correspond to any kind of reflective response to the preceding statements. This does make the film move swiftly along, which can have its advantages when the film is based primarily on court testimony. But it would appear that Bresson may have overcompensated in this regard. The film is only 62 minutes in length, and it might have benefitted from the insertion of more reflective pauses now and then, such as were employed by Olmi in Il Posto.

The overall effect created by Bresson is nevertheless impressive. The rapid-fire exchanges undertaken by expressionless, seemingly body-snatched, clergy make the entire proceedings even more relentlessly inhuman. In Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, the clergy are often simply seen as spiteful, greedy, and malicious. The clergy in that film are prey to all the faults of self-motivated sinners. But in Bresson’s’ film, the clergy are soulless automata that are faceless representatives of the Church machine. In Dreyer’s film, the clergy in Rouen could be seen to comprise individual sinners who failed to act in the manner of true Christians. In Bresson’s film, however, the Church, itself, stands as an implacable opponent of the individual who has been inspired by the spirit of God. This is a more profound indictment. Bresson's aesthetic style, which evokes a feeling that everyone in the film is sleepwalking, enhances the sense of horror that this indictment arouses. In this connection it should be noted that the real Joan was not tutored as a youth by scholarly churchmen, but most probably by monks of the Franciscan order, which has affinities with Sufism. This “folk-level teaching” of the Franciscans in the community would likely contrast sharply with the ethos of a worldly Church in the middle of doctrinal and organizational power disputes and seeking to impose its control over its followers. The idea of an ecstatic mystic who had direct spiritual encounters was anathema to the established order of the Church, but not to certain Sufic modes of being, both in and outside Christianity. Joan had to be condemned as a heretic, in order for the Churchmen to retain their structured command over the laity and the people at large. This is perhaps also why the Church was so tardy (1920) in canonizing Joan. In fact it’s remarkable that this dramatically independent individual, inspired by her own profound spiritual experiences, was ever endorsed by the clerical establishment. Note that this grim rationale of control over spirituality parallels the thesis presented in Dostoyevsky's parable from The Brothers Karamzaov, "The Grand Inquisitor". Dostoyevsky's work was a major influence on Bresson, having also inspired his Pickpocket (1959), Une Femme Douce (1969), and Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971).

In line with these thematic differences, Bresson’s character, "Joan", is dramatically different from Dreyer’s "Joan", who is played by Falconetti. Falconetti evinces in Dreyer’s film the pathos of Joan, showing her intense fear and anguish, as well as the way she summoned the inner reserves of her faith in order to endure the grueling trial and execution. The viewer cannot help but feel compassion for this Joan during the agonizing struggle between her and the authorities. Bresson’s “Joan”, played by Florence Delay, is much more self-contained and less vulnerable. Despite the hostile circumstances of her captivity (continuously enchained and spied upon), she is generally composed and sure of both herself and her answers. Unlike Faconetti, Delay seems not to anticipate receiving true justice and is not awed by the eminence of her captors. She sometimes even demands that her rights be acknowledged, and she denies the authority of the ecclesiastical court, saying that she obeys in preference the higher authorities of King and God. It is well-known, of course, that Bresson doesn’t use professional actors, because he wants to avoid having someone "perform" a role – presumably because he wants his players to embody the character in an intuitive way. But it is interesting that his selected “models” are usually intellectuals, writers, and professionals. Florence Delay was the daughter of a member of the Académie Française, and she, herself, was elected to that body years later. So it seems that his models might have the inclination (and even be encouraged) to engage the character in an intellectual, rather than intuitive, manner. Intellectually-inspired or not, Delay’s “Joan” is nonetheless effective and convincing. At 20, Delay was about a decade younger than Falconetti was for Dreyer's film, and she was closer to the real Joan's age at the time of the trial. She managed to demonstrate in this film a youthful confidence, as well as innocence, that provides the real dramatic underpinning the story -- a courageous young woman is ground down to cinder and embers by a ruthless theological machine that has compromised itself for political purposes.

The final image of the film is the charred remains of Joan at the stake. We are left to reflect on what that means to us. Bresson’s films often evoke and engage the spiritual yearnings of man, but he himself was said to be an agnostic - a seeker who had yet to find the answer. As with many others of his films, there is no explicit or material promise offered, but there is still that unquenchable thirst for grace.
★★★

"Pickpocket" - Robert Bresson (1959)

Following on from his two masterworks, Diary of a Country Priest (1950) and A Man Escaped (1956), Robert Bresson next made Pickpocket, which combined elements from both of those two earlier films to describe the experiences of a petty criminal. Like Diary of a Country Priest, the story is presented as the visual realisation of a journal account describing the protagonist’s life. And like A Man Escaped, the account focuses intensely on the “confinement” of the main character and his efforts to avoid capture. Thanks largely to Bresson’s bare, minimalist style, critics seem to have imbued the film with extra qualities drawn from their own mindsets and have come up with quite contrasting interpretations. Some see it from a spiritual or moral point of view, others from psychological and even sexual perspectives. There is universal agreement on only one issue, however: this film is not a typical police thriller (but of course the viewer is informed of this in the opening sequence). Many reviewers remark that Pickpocket was inspired or influenced by Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, but I would go further and assert that the film is essentially Bresson’s adaptation of “Crime and Punishment”. Bresson’s fascination with Dostroyevky’s work was further manifested by his subsequent Une Femme Douce (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), which were explicitly acknowledged adaptations.

As is characteristic of Bresson films, there is no background information provided for any of the characters, and throughout the film we only see events seen by the protagonist, Michel. And, again, critical dynamic actions take place offscreen and are only referred to. For example, the opening scene, described in Michel’s voice-over, covers his initial pickpocketing effort at a racetrack, but omits his immediately following arrest by the police.

In the next few of scenes, lasting about twenty minutes, we learn that

1. Michel only occasionally and reluctantly visits his ill and soon-to-die mother, whose attractive young neighbour, Jeanne, looks after her.
2. Michel’s friend Jacques, who is interested in Jeanne, expresses his worries about Michel’s degenerating lifestyle and tells of him of his willingness to loan him money.
3. The police inspector suspects that Michel is a pickpocket, but cannot yet prove anything. Michel tells the inspector his theory that superior individuals should be above the law and be permitted to steal.
4. Michel is befriended by another, more skilled, pickpocket, who shows him some tricks and indicates his willingness to include Michel in his pickpocketing team. Their technique always involves a first person lifting someone’s wallet and immediately passing it to a second person, who then passes it quickly to a third person, who departs the scene.

The ensuing forty minutes depict a series of pickpocketing capers by Michel and his gang, interspersed with encounters variously involving Jacques, Jeanne, and the suspicious police inspector. Eventually, after an extended pickpocketing session at the train station, Michel’s accomplices are arrested by the police, and Jeanne is called in for a police interview. Suspecting that the police are about to arrest him, Michel skips town. We are told in voice-over that he then travelled about Europe performing various acts of thievery, but after two years of this and once again penniless, he returned to Paris. Upon his return he learns Jeanne and Jacques had been lovers and had a child. But Jeanne is now alone with the child, apparently a consequence of her having informed Jacques that she didn’t love him enough to marry him.

Michel vows to help support Jeanne financially and promises to live honestly. But he can’t help succumbing to the old temptation and is soon stung and arrested for attempting to pick the pocket of a police decoy. Jeanne comes to visit Michel in prison, and on her second visit, they merely have to look at each other to recognise finally their deep affinity. They kiss through the bars of the interview window, and in voice-over, Michel says, “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take,” as the film ends.

The comparison with Crime and Punishment merits further discussion, and it is interesting to compare Pickpocket with Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment. In both stories we have

• a talented young protagonist who believes that his intelligence and overall superiority entitle him to commit crimes;
• a mother who dies suspecting that her son is a criminal;
• a police inspector who spars intellectually with the protagonist and dismisses his “superman” theory about criminal justification;
• a close male friend who supports the protagonist;
• a self-sacrificing woman who offers her unconditional love, even knowing that her beloved is a criminal.
• a final moment of surrender and redemption that is accompanied by a submission to the call of love.

But Bresson’s vision has significant differences from Dostoyevsky's. Raskolnikov committed a single, violent act of murder, but he was not a serial murderer. He committed his crime to serve some ends which he felt justified that act. Michel, by contrast, is a petty criminal who has embraced a meaningless life of crime. Much of Crime and Punishment involves the tightening noose of suspicion and guilt that is relentlessly encircling Raskolnikov. We don’t feel that kind of narrative tension in Pickpocket. Michel's activities are unmotivated, and so is Jeanne’s growing affection for him. We don’t get inside Michel’s head and experience his world in quite the way we do with Raskolnikov. In fact the principal aspect of Michel’s life seems to be its emptiness, which is underscored by Bresson’s mise en scene.

Bresson’s characteristic style is to use unprofessional actors who render “flat” performances and show almost no emotion when they read their lines with downcast glances. He is famous for drilling his actors with repeated readings, until there are no thespian elements to a performance, in fact no performance whatsoever. Conversations in his films often feature unmotivated pauses separating the individual statements. Shots often begin with just a static view of a room or a doorway for several seconds before anyone appears to engage in action. At the end of a shot, the actors often depart from the scene, but the camera shot is still held on a now-empty doorway or environment for several seconds. These pauses take us out of the flow of action and into reflection. Many commentators, including director and film scholar, Paul Schrader, claim there are no close-ups in the film, but this is misleading, if not downright false. In fact there are so many medium close-ups and so few establishing long shots that the film has a confined, claustrophobic feeling, reminiscent of the films of Wong Kar Wai. This provides a further sense of the cramped, suffocating existence of Michel. All these techniques give the filmed events a dreamlike quality, as if all the characters are sleepwalking. When we watch this, we feel, that we, too, are in a dream, and we are unconsciously forced to reflect on its meaning – just as we do with our own dreams. We viewers are the ones who must struggle to assemble the parts and make a meaning out of them.

This assembly of unconnected building blocks is particularly appropriate for the story of Pickpocket, because Michel, himself, is unable to find any meaning out of life. Until he gains some revelation at the end of the film, his empty life is just a bunch of disconnected building blocks. So thematically, the Bresonian style is particularly apt for Michel’s tale. But as a narrative approach, it is not so effective here. Although many Bresson enthusiasts consider Pickpocket to be at the top of his achievements, I do not share this feeling. It is difficult for us to identify with Michel, whereas we do identify somewhat with Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov, at least, believes in his own specialness. Michel doesn’t seem to believe in anything, and the only source of “energy” he can find in existence is the thrill of committing a crime. But showing this kind of apathy on film is usually only enervating for the viewer. It is true that the final emotional moment in Pickpocket is a welcome relief, but it’s only that. It is basically unmotivated and comes as something of a shock. It is certainly not equal to the brilliant culmination that provides both exhilaration and closure in A Man Escaped.
★★★