Word: michel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That domain, which is also the habitat of her lover Charles (Michel Piccoli), begins to bore Lucile, and so she starts spending her afternoons with handsome, earnest young Antoine (Roger Van Hool). Before long, he insists that she choose between them. "Pourquoi?" pouts Lucile, and the limits of her horizons are drawn a bit more clearly. She knows that Charles will have her back any time she likes, so she moves in with Antoine. Antoine obliges her to take a job; soon, too, she is pregnant. She decides she does not like the realities of this world either...
Images of entrapment abound in Pickpocket. Michel is consistently found between two people. In more than one case these are police detectives. More interesting, however, are the patterns of light which Bresson manages to achieve. Bresson is fanatical in his use of light. Capable of creating films entirely in whites (Au Hasard Balthazar) or in blacks (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette), in Pickpocket Bresson uses both in conjunction to demonstrate the difference between Michel's acts and their consequences...
...scenes of pickpocketing itself are all dominated by blacks, the color of the wallet or the clothing of the victims. Michel himself, however, always wears a white shirt and either his room or the corridor outside contain areas of light into which he invariably steps. At a central point in the film he goes to visit his dying mother. As he lies to her about her health and bends over her bed, rays or light cross him like prison bars. That light should entrap is something almost inpermissible in our set of conventions; Bresson's use of it to convey...
There is a third character in the sequence described above, the girl Jeanne who is the agent of Michel's salvation. Like Michel, she permits herself to be degraded. After he flees Paris, she becomes pregnant by his friend Jim, but unlike Michel she does not permit herself to believe in her own degradation and refuses Jim's offer of marriage. Whenever a sequence includes both Jeanne and Michel the ligthing becomes fantastically complex, creating dark and light areas through which the characters continually move. It is only at the end, when separated by the bars of the prison...
...coming, that good man." The Kampala police band, its drummers in leopardskin overalls, played the Uganda national anthem as President Milton Obote greeted the Pontiff. Heads of four other African states stood by in a LandRover: Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Burundi's Michel Mi-combero and Rwanda's Gregoire Kayi-banda. Then the Pope was off, in an open Lincoln Continental, for the 28-mile ride into Kampala, past welcoming signs saying, "Papa from the Vatican" and "Holy Father, Bless Our House...