The Road to Heaven

Pickpocket. French Director Robert Bresson is a Christian cinemascetic who in 29 years has made only seven movies. None of them is a masterpiece, but the best of them (Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped) are luminous meditations on the life of man in the sight of God. In Pickpocket, a picture so original in style that it sometimes seems downright peculiar, Bresson propounds a harrowing paradox: that man must sin in order to be saved, that the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions.

The plot is a palingenesis of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Like Raskolnikov, the hero (Martin La Salle) is a penniless student with Nietzschean notions about crime: "Some men are stronger and more talented than others and have the right to break the law. Their crimes revitalize society." Such thoughts impelled Raskolnikov to murder; they inspire Michel to pick pockets. The crimes differ in seriousness, but not in spiritual effect. In both cases, the crime compels the hero to experience successively sin, guilt, despair, contrition, atonement, love.

As the story ends, Michel reaches through the bars that define his freedom and wonderingly touches the young woman he now knows he loves. "What a strange and terrible way I had to travel," he says in a trembling voice, "to find you."

The moment is exquisitely interpreted and profoundly affecting, but the rest of the film is cold. However, the chill is deliberate. It counterfeits the frigid region of unbeing inhabited by the hero. It forces the spectator to see the hero's life from an infinite distance, with an infinite impersonality. The experience is uncanny. It makes the moviegoer feel almost like a god.

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