Meditate upon martyrs
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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Three Robert Bresson films revelled in a mystical tone
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POWERFUL IMAGESWhile The Diary (1951) is based on George Bernanos's story, The Pickpocket is based on Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment
Robert Bresson started off as painter and photographer, which explains his espousing the cause of the cinematographer. Bresson has often been referred to as the patron saint of cinema for the Catholic themes in his cinema, as well his contribution to the medium. Bresson brings to mind another strongly Catholic filmmaker - Martin Scorsese. The films of the two masters are very different. While both deal with redemption and salvation, they approach it in different ways.
While Scorsese is all about life on the mean streets of New York, with frames crackling with a nervous energy, Bresson's movies are all about pauses and the empty spaces where we used to talk.
In this day of staccato cuts and dissolves, the cinema takes one to another time frame, to another world when silences speak as powerfully as pages of dialogue. Though Bresson wished to move away from the theatrical model where the actor propelled the action, his kind of cinema, which called for multiple takes till every nuance of performance was stripped away, called for a different level of histrionics.
Collective Chaos screened three of Bresson's films - The Diary of a Country Priest, Pickpocket and Au Hasard Balthazar. The Diary (1951) is based on George Bernanos's story. A young priest comes to a particularly unfriendly village to be the parish priest. The children in the village are a churlish lot led by a particularly sadistic little girl. Then there is an adulterous count, his overwrought wife and his sad daughter. There is a doctor who has lost his faith and will to live and then there is the young priest dying of cancer trying to make sense of it all.
The film shot in Bresson's legendary simplistic style is full of claustrophobic close-ups and we know every line on the young priest's (fetchingly played by Claude Laydu) face. Though the silence is welcome after the incredible decibels levels we live with every day, one wishes there was a little less mysticism and a few more answers. The cosmic rationale is all very well but it would have been better if we knew why the characters did what they did. Otherwise one just loses patience with the sly taunts, the poison pen letters, which after a point in time leaves one in a state of exhaustion.
The Pickpocket (1959) one the other hand is more straightforward. The 75-minute film does not allow for a lazy audience but does not hide behind fogs of obscure mysticism either. Inspired by the famous Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment, The Pickpocket has the narcissistic Michel at the centre of action. He can get himself a job anytime but considers himself above mundane things like doing a regular job.
He believes he is special and it is for the lowly masses to provide him with the money to live his life and he allows the lesser mortals to give him that money by picking their pockets. He meets a fellow pickpocket who teaches him the tricks of the trade. He lives alone in a room with his books and plays an involved game of cat and mouse with the inspector who suspects him but does not have the proof of it. When Jeanne, his mother's neighbour comes to tell him, his mother is dying and wishes to see him, he sends money, but does not go. The last line of the movie when he is in jail and Jeanne comes to see him: "Oh Jeanne, what a strange way I had to take to meet you," explains a lot. The scene, along with the act of picking a pocket, has sexual overtones to it.
The scenes showing the actual picking of pockets have a strange and fascinating sinewy grace with all its close ups of hands and wallets. The film is more accessible for we know why Michel does what he does. Maybe he is just misguided and will walk the straight and narrow for the good woman.
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) also talks of familiar themes of martyrdom and mystery where a young girl and her beloved donkey take on the sins of others on themselves to become the scapegoats for society.
The films were a perfect way to see the works of a master as well as the resonance of his work in the present day.
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