PICKPOCKET Movie Review

Though Robert Bresson's great Pickpocket is a scripted film, meticulously photographed, edited, and performed, it leaves you with the feeling that you have seen something more authentic, naked, and true than any work of so-called cinéma vérité. The movie's protagonist (played by a non-professional actor, as are most of the parts in Bresson's films) is obsessed with the exhilaration he experiences while stealing, and he practices his craft with an intensity and concentration that borders on the holy. The details of his acts of theft are depicted by Bresson with this same kind of near-religious respect; watching him and other thieves at work in a crowded train station is such a pure, focused, and exacting piece of cinema that it becomes, as writer/director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Patty Hearst) has written, a “transcendental” experience. The thief attempts at one point—following an arrest—to give those who care for him a higher priority by abandoning his trade, but its pull proves irresistible. Even so, the possibility of redemption lurks everywhere in Pickpocket, and when that moment finally arrives it is simpler and vastly more affecting than we could have anticipated. Incidentally, the same Paul Schrader who wrote of Pickpocket's brilliance so convincingly wasn't above adapting virtually the same climactic moment of redemption to end—considerably less effectively than Bresson—his otherwise witty and entertaining American Gigolo.

NEXT STOP … A Condemned Man Has Escaped, L'Argent, The Thief of Paris, American Gigolo

1959 75m/B FR Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie, Pierre Etaix, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal; D: Robert Bresson; W: Robert Bresson; C: L.H. Burel. VHS NYF, FCT, TPV