|
Not a thriller but a young man's nightmare, announces the preface, the style is to be observed. Un voleur by compulsion, the lanky narcissist who resembles Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln (Martin LaSalle) and moves in on a spectator's purse at the racetrack while horses gallop off-screen. He lives in the hovel at the top of the stairs, keeps a tome on Barrington "the Prince of Pickpockets," refuses to see his dying mother. His "dangerous" theory is on the genius above the law, debated with the police inspector (Jean Pélégri). "That's the world upside down." "It's already upside down. This would set it right." Tricks of the trade, a matter of nerve—the folded newspaper that snatches the wallet on the subway, deft fingers that unbutton coats and unfasten wristwatches, balletic little violations executed for the blankly rapt camera. "Je n'aurai jamais ma main," says Rimbaud, Robert Bresson charts the "chemins étranges" of a soul in limbo. Crime like a prestidigitator's art, the illicit frisson of brushing against strangers in crystalline space, the deadpan gaze that mysteriously captures an accelerated pulse. Paris is a realm of nervous somnambulists, twice Bresson dollies in for a close-up of the cosmos within a pinball machine. "Odd methods." "Leave my methods out of it!" The larcenous Raskolnikov locates his Sonya in the comely caretaker (Marika Green), the virtuous pull toward normalcy and responsibility who's left with a fatherless toddler. Body parts in motion, cuts on gestures and dissolves on diary pages, hard-boiled technique makes for a hyper-concentrated flow. The veni creator spiritus has a different sound for the rebel who yearns to get caught, it comes in a crowd with the click of manacles. (Godard in Détective remembers the hands congruent at the piano.) The miracle in prison is as simple as a caress. "These walls, these bars... I don't even see them." Cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel. With Pierre Leymarie, Dolly Scal, Kassagi, and Pierre Étaix. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |