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Michel (Martin Lasalle) is a petty thief
who, after being arrested and then re-
leased, starts discussing the rights and
wrongs of crime with the police inspec-
tor. The only way he can find a place for
himself in society is to engineer a head-
on collision with it. It gives him a reason
to live.
In that way, picking pockets becomes an
exciting, almost sexual adventure. It is a
kind of pact with the Devil. But he has to
leave France for London when the band
of thieves he joins is arrested. |
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And when he returns he is also caught. It is only when he is visited in prison by Jeanne (Marika
Green), the girl who looked after his mother before she died and is now abandoned with a child,
that he realises that his whole life could be changed by love.
Robert Bresson was one of the foremost artists of the modern cinema, acclaimed as such by
directors of a younger generation as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and
Andrei Tarkovsky. He was a fastidious and uncompromising film-maker whose work had an un-
mistakable style and expressed a strong personal vision. The word most often used to describe
his films was austere. Like his contemporary in the theatre, Samuel Beckett, he reduced his art
to its barest essentials. His films were slow and deliberate, devoid of cinematic flourishes, using
minimum dialogue and dispensing with conventional music. Although many of Bresson’s films began, paradoxically, as literary adaptations, the results were pure cinema. |
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