Two Films (by Bresson)

Over the past couple days, I've watched Michael Haneke's Le Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf) and Robert Bresson's much older Pickpocket. I was interested when I heard Isabelle Huppert, in an interview included on the DVD, note that many people compare Haneke's pacing with that of Bresson. Superficially, this claim is very valid - they both keep camera movement to a minimum, in general, and tend to rely very heavily on shots of very long duration. However, and Huppert notes this as well, although to make a different point, the uses to which they put these stylistic choices are very different.
Haneke is stretching us to the breaking point - this goes hand in hand with the realism that he seems to be directing his actors to. A very good example of this is in the scene when the central family of the film first arrives at their vacation home in the French countryside. They unexpectedly encounter a family of what appears to be middle class standing, judging by their clothes. This second family has taken refuge in the house and they violently resist the intrusion of the owners. The scene in its entirety deserves a more thorough treatment than I want to offer right now, but it does contain a moment of strange (realistic, perhaps) potency.
The father of the family living in the house responds to the other father's attempts at a peaceful reconciliation by shooting him, by what feels like raw impulse. The specific event I want to focus on is the reaction of the wife, played by Huppert. Her face is blank; she does not immediately scream or freak out, unlike the wife of the shooter, who becomes immediately hysteric, repeating over and over to her husband, "You killed him!" Huppert's character instead looks off in disbelief and, finally, vomits.
What Haneke is offering us, then, is not a psychology as much as a physiology. We do not hear her voice her anguish, but we cannot avoid seeing it. For Bresson, however, there is nothing we cannot avoid. The entire epiphany of the film (as well as the subtle foreshadowing towards it) is easily missed - and that's what gives it its epiphanic quality. The crux of the difference between Haneke's and Bresson's work lies here, and this is perhaps where Huppert is justified in qualifying the comment about their resemblence. For her, Haneke is equal measures Bresson and Hitchcock. This is true in several senses.
First, Le Temps du Loup is structured as by the MacGuffin: the entire setup of world-wide catastrophe is just a device, later almost forgotten, to bring us to the point of seeing the futility of these characters' lives and, by extension, to recognize the West's immense privilege with respect to the majority of humanity.
Second, there is the immense build-up in tension to the final revelation. The quality of the revelation is, more than anything else, what distinguishes this film from Hitchcock and Bresson, but in formula, it resembles Hitchcock. The whole film is a building up to the final scene (excluding the train coda) where we find the young boy trying to burn himself for the sake of the community of survivors. This triggers another character, who is on watch, to come to his rescue and comfort him. This particular character has previously been characterized as xenophobic and unforgiving - these characteristics are perhaps not overridden in these final moments of tenderness, but they are certainly put to the side as Haneke presents us with the movie's first human (in a positive sense) moment. And with it, as a sort of justification for the entire film, perhaps, he lets us know that he does place faith in humanity.
Bresson, on the other hand, is not so obvious with his moments of revelation. Their foundation is the subtle changes in phrasing and expression, the gap between the characters of his film and the humans we know them to be - how else to explain their cryptic behavior but to introduce a human element? It is Michel's task in this film to discover what being human in such a world would mean. For the viewer, as well, his humanity only makes sense in the last moment, with the delivery, the only realistic delivery in the entire film, of the final line. For Bresson, the plot truly matters in a Hitchcockian sense, as it is the experience of each moment of Michel's life, not just the circumstances they allow to be set up, is crucial to understanding of the epiphany.