"Pickpocket" and "Mouchette": A vision of cinema without candy
I have to confess something that ought to disqualify me from this lofty position: I've never been the world's biggest fan of Robert Bresson, the patron saint of French cinema (and, some might argue, of all cinema). I can't quite explain what the deal is. The stripped-down aesthetic of Bresson's short, untalky and mostly undecorated films is magnificently executed. I'm not usually scared off by rigorous moral hoo-ha, or explorations of faith in a postwar Europe losing its religion, blah blah blah. I'll watch Ingmar Bergman's most mediocre films repeatedly, and one could argue they're mining the same philosophical vein.

Until now, at least, I've always admired Bresson's astringent combination of Sartre, Dostoevsky and minimalism more than I've liked it. Even when Bergman is going on about the death of God, or depicting a gruesome family meltdown, he's always informed by the theatrical traditions of melodrama and domestic comedy, and by the entertainment cinema he watched as a child. His fundamental shots are always close-ups of the human face, while Bresson's shots are formal, meticulous, almost architectural. If Bresson ever saw entertainment film, he probably disapproved of it; his 1959 masterpiece "Pickpocket" begins with a crawl that grimly warns the viewer not to expect a thriller. ("Ce film n'est pas du style policier.")

It isn't a thriller, either; as I think I have finally realized after seeing "Pickpocket" three or four times, it's not about crime at all, any more than "Crime and Punishment" is. It's really a study of male arrogance, unhappiness and self-delusion, in the spirit (if not at all in the manner) of "Hamlet" or Balzac's "Lost Illusions." Like most of Bresson's work, it carries a strong level of Christian allegory, which the filmmaker sees (I think) not in terms of organized religion but as a transcendent theme capable of organizing the amoral anarchy of human life.

Bresson made only 14 feature films in a career spanning almost 50 years. His enormous reputation as an avatar of cinematic seriousness rests on a handful of those: Besides "Pickpocket," one could point to "Mouchette," "Au Hasard Balthasar," "The Diary of a Country Priest," "A Man Escaped" and "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne." Others of his films have their followers -- his last film, the 1983 "L'Argent," is now available in a fine DVD from New Yorker Films -- but lack the same canonical status.

Now that I've damned a great artist with my dunderheaded faint praise, I should make clear that the re-releases of "Pickpocket" and the 1967 "Mouchette," which should soon be coming your way in some form, are riveting, exacting and in their sugar-free fashion beautiful films. Somehow the deliberately affectless performance of Martin La Salle as the doomed protagonist of "Pickpocket" draws you into the character's moral torment in a way all today's wounded method acting never could -- and the wordless sequence where he learns the pickpocket's trade is masterful editing, and one of the only truly comic sequences in Bresson's work.

"Mouchette," which follows the travails of an abused girl in rural France, is if anything a tougher film to take. While La Salle's Michel is offered a degree of earthly redemption in "Pickpocket," the saintly title character played by Nadine Nortier is held at tremendous distance from the viewer. She's an almost anonymous archetype of suffering, and the only escape she can find -- in a clear reference to Joan of Arc, one of Bresson's touchstones -- is metaphysical transcendence. I don't think it's a misogynist film, as some have argued, but it's clearly a mystical one.

"Pickpocket" plays Oct. 7-13 at Film Forum in New York, and will be released on DVD in November. "Mouchette" plays Oct. 14-20 at Film Forum, with engagements in other cities to be announced.

"Zombie Honeymoon": To love and to honor, in sickness and in living death
It would be hopelessly unfair not to spare a few words for Dave Gebroe's "Zombie Honeymoon," a highly disturbing combination of gruesome gore and earnest, tragic romance not encountered since David Cronenberg's "The Fly," if ever. While this low-budget feature begins as frenetic domestic comedy, with newlyweds Denise (Tracy Coogan) and Danny (Graham Sibley) heading to the New Jersey shore to foment big plans for the future, it soon takes a sharp left turn. This isn't into the wacky mock-horror realm one expects, but rather into the serious-filmmaker terrain of love and loss. When Danny is attacked on the beach by a flesh-eating zombie (hey, it could happen) and comes back from the dead as a slavering ghoul, Denise is faced with a fundamental dilemma: Can you still love the person you love after they've changed?

OK, there is some comedy here. Zombie Danny eats a travel agent with bad Harriet Miers makeup and leopard-print pants. But even that scene is sad! The young lovers go to buy tickets for their long-dreamed-of trip to Portugal, and Danny can't stop chowing down on human flesh long enough for that! Coogan and Sibley are absolutely terrific, the script is better than those of most horror movies I see, and after Gebroe settles down, the film's strange blend of tragedy and surreal gore, à la Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, is surprisingly effective. For the right person, and you know who you are, this one's a must-see.

"Zombie Honeymoon" is now playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York. Other cities may follow.

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