Black desert pickpocket how to#

Even the brief musical interventions, French baroque by Lully – they provide a kind of ersatz emotion to the sequences in which they appear – feel more like an imposed feature than an expression of the characters’ inner drama. I am left with the suspicion that form, in this case carefully thought-out rather than growing organically from the emotional heart of the story, may impress by its rigour but make the films oddly unengaging. Such an exercise in style is central to the film’s appeal and reputation, and yet, as with other Bresson films – stripped as they are of the engaging tropes of narrative cinema – I personally find the austerity unappealing. That Michel should not show the flicker of a smile throughout is an essential feature of a film that avoids the display of affect, the mainstay of mainstream cinema, from first to last frame. So much so that he shows little interest in his ageing mother, and has to be coaxed by Jeanne (the Swedish actress Marika Green), the young woman who looks after her.

Black desert pickpocket how to#

He seems to be almost totally devoid of emotion – or at least knows how to hide it. Michel is a master of impassivity, and a model of cool. There is indeed – as with much of Bresson – an underlying connection with Catholicism. Like Raskolnikov in the Russian 19 th century classic, Michel is tormented by reflections on the nature of crime and guilt. The script, the first to be written by Bresson himself, owes much to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The film always looks great, with cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel. Much is played out in the close quarters of the metro. There are beautifully shot and edited sequences that demonstrate the fine dexterity and cliff-hanging risk of slipping a hand delicately in and out a pocket or a bag, and lifting the wallet or cash from mostly unsuspecting victims. Michel, played by the non-professional Martin LaSalle, is the thief who learns the tricks of his trade from a gang of professionals, and plays through the film a game of cat and mouse with the police.