Robert Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket – the story of a young man who turns to petty crime in Paris and what happens to him as a result – was recently shown at the British Film Institute in the context of a season of films of the Nouvelle Vague. This was the name given to a generation of younger, self-taught film-makers – most notably François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard – who came to prominence in late-1950s France with ground-breaking low-budget films that captured a postwar world of café terraces and bars, students’ garrets filled with books and art posters, and romance by turns exhilarating and world-weary. Clustered around the film magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma, the Nouvelle Vague directors were reacting against the conventional studio-set productions of ‘le cinéma de Papa’, its classically trained actors and small rota of seasoned directors. But although Godard and Truffaut admired Bresson, does he fit alongside them within the Nouvelle Vague?

Bresson’s Pickpocket was released in the same year as Godard’s seminal À bout de souffle, which follows the erratic, irrepressible journey of a charming young gangster played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups, about an unhappy teenage boy (Jean-Pierre Léaud’s first part) turning into a delinquent. On the surface, Pickpocket resembles both those films and others of the same era. Shot in elegant black and white in Paris, it follows Michel (played by Martin LaSalle) from his attic room to the streets and the métro and back again, as he meets friends and accomplices over a drink in a bar or a game of pinball in a café. Here, too, the protagonist is drawn into a life of crime in the surroundings of an indifferent, bustling metropolis. Pickpocket also features another Nouvelle Vague trope: an enigmatic young woman, Jeanne (Marika Green), as Michel’s possible love interest.

And yet Pickpocket is a film by Robert Bresson, and therefore a highly singular one. Bresson was born in 1901, came to filmmaking in his forties after a first career as an artist, and was 58 years old when he made Pickpocket, the work of a mature auteur whose idiosyncratic preoccupations are radically different from those of the Nouvelle Vague rebels. In the film’s foreword, which appears on the screen as a short piece of text, the director makes clear his unusual purpose: ‘This is not a detective film. The author is trying to express, through images and sounds, the nightmare of a young man drawn by his weakness into a pickpocketing adventure for which he was not cut out. Except that this adventure, through strange pathways, will reunite two souls who, without it, might never have known each other.’

In other words, this isn’t a gangster movie and there will be no car chases and no shoot-outs. By contrast, Godard stated playfully (after D.W. Griffith) that ‘to make a movie you only need a girl and a gun.’ Bresson’s disclaimer is also an artistic statement of intent. He maintained a strict distinction between the ‘cinema’ of others – which he thought was too often a kind of inauthentic filmed theatre – and ‘cinematograph’, the exacting, pared-down art form he pursued, understood as a way of ‘writing’ with images and sounds where much of the meaning lies in the editing. Or, in Bresson’s words, it is ‘what happens in the joints’.

Pickpocket is emblematic of Bresson’s aesthetic in its focus on objects and everyday gestures, faces and hands, and on empty or transitional spaces such as staircases and corridors. The dialogue is sparse. In terms of acting, Bresson rejected what he called ‘masquerade’ and fraudulent realism – the play-acting and mannerisms of professional actors – and used non-professionals whom he called ‘models’, tutoring them in a style of performance that has become known as Bressonian – uninflected, blank, suggestive of sleepwalking. Bresson sought ‘automatism’, because, he explained, 90 per cent of our movements are habitual and automatic, and not the result of any thought or decision. His ‘models’ do not come from the world of acting but rather from ‘being’. The overall effect is strange, actually rather more surrealist than realist. In Pickpocket, we are often looking at LaSalle’s face, wide open and yet entirely opaque, and Marika Green speaks in a remarkable voice that one imagines might come from a statue.

However, because authenticity is a complicated business, the film contains one professional, Kassagi, not an actor but a real-life pickpocket, who in the story takes on Michel as an apprentice and tutors him in the tricks of the trade. Kassagi is listed in the credits as ‘Conseiller technique pour les gestes des voleurs’. And Pickpocket delights in the gestures of the thieves, the choreographed movements of their hands, their connivence with each other. The most exhilarating and hypnotic sequences show the pickpockets in action as a team. There is great tactile sensuousness in those scenes, and even a strange kind of eroticism.

Bresson’s ‘cinematograph’ approach was influential on many other filmmakers, leaving his mark on Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Aki Kaurismäki, Chantal Akerman, Paul Schrader, and many others. Pickpocket casts its shadow over Taxi Driver, which Schrader scripted. The scene where Travis Bickle practises making the gun slide out of his sleeve into his hand became known on set as ‘the Pickpocket scene’. Schrader later borrowed Pickpocket’s ending for his own film American Gigolo.

As we follow Michel’s criminal initiation as a pickpocket, we notice, beside the quality of the performances, other unusual aspects of the film. For example, the solemnity of the baroque music score – by Jean-Baptiste Lully – and Michel’s garret, with its leprous walls, which could be a monk’s cell or a prison cell. None of this feels like the youthful effervescence of the Nouvelle Vague.

Meanwhile, is Michel, a disaffected postwar youth who claims to have chosen crime as an elite pursuit, a sort of Existentialist? Does he, as Jean-Paul Sartre posited, believe that life has no meaning except the one that each being chooses to give it? Michel does talk in this way. But Pickpocket is not an Existentialist film. In a way it’s the opposite of that, because there is meaning, and this meaning is preordained.

The film’s disclaimer – ‘nightmare’, ‘strange pathways’, ‘souls’ – gestures towards the hinterland of Pickpocket, which is religious and Catholic. Bresson was a Catholic filmmaker, but – like Eric Rohmer, though by different means – he expressed this on the slant. When Michel wonders repeatedly why he did something or how he found himself in another person’s path, the question really being asked is: does the protagonist have free will, or is he being moved by a higher power? Beyond the story of a criminal and the wondrous sleight-of-hand of pickpocketing, Bresson explores what happens to people and their souls in a fallen world, a world turned upside-down, a ‘nightmare’ where evil is perceptible. And in such a context, can there be salvation through grace? Perhaps there can – following ‘strange pathways’.

Bresson always wanted to make a film of the Book of Genesis, from the Creation all the way to the Tower of Babel. The film – too ambitious and expensive, even for such a minimalist, who, when it came to filming Noah’s Ark, did not want to show any animals, but only their tracks in the earth – was never made. But Pickpocket is expressive of Bresson’s preoccupation with the mysteries of original sin, predestination and salvation.

Bresson’s Catholicism is informed by Jansenist thinking, a 17^th century religious movement embraced by Blaise Pascal, that centres on a belief in predestination. Because of the Fall, divine grace is not given to all, only to some. Grace is therefore irresistible and there is, in fact, no free will. With this context in mind, the automatic quality of the performances and the morality-play quality of the dialogue (‘Are you a prophet?’ Michel asks a police inspector) resonate very differently when watching Pickpocket.

While freeing himself from the canon of classic cinema, Bresson follows a pathway quite different from that of his Nouvelle Vague colleagues, wrestling with the mysteries of conversion and redemption and leaving much unexplained. Pickpocket ends with a beginning and an awakening, as though what came before – the film itself – had been a sort of dream journey. Ultimately, Pickpocket is a thriller – but a thriller of Bresson’s invention, with, just possibly, another world behind the tactile world that he shows us.