Paris. Michel is a lad who enjoys stealing wallets from passerby. He is arrested by a police chief, but since Michel only had money with him, it cannot be undeniably established that it belonged to a woman he robbed, so he is released from custody. Michel meets a girl, Jeanne, who takes care of his infirm mother, and gives her some money. Michel joins a gang of professional pickpockets who teach him the art of stealing: in a bank, on the street, at a bus station, in a train... When Michel's mother dies and the police break the gang ring, Michel leaves his apartment and hides in London for two years. When he returns, he is surprised to find that Jeanne is now taking care of a baby all by herself, which she had with their friend Jacques. Michel decides to support them. He wants to steal money from a man's jacket, but the latter turns out to be a cop who arrests him. In prison, Jeanne and Michel admit they love each other.
One of Robert Bresson's most critically recognized films, "Pickpocket" is a much more intruiging film in his opus due to its theme of pickpockets, yet the director still stubbornly presents the story in his minimalist, ascetic and deliberately de-dramatized edition, which might turn off a part of the audience. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment", but also Camus' "The Stranger", "Pickpocket" is a contemplation on one of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not steal", and its effects on the life of the anti-hero Michel: he could find a job and make a decent living, but he has some sort of a nihilist contempt towards the modern society which he channels in a misguided rebellion in the form of stealing wallets from people; and yet, on the other hand, he avoids seeing his sick mother, probably out of shame of becoming a criminal and disappointing her idealistic vision of him. At one point in the film, he even says: "I believed in God... For about three minutes." Unlike De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves", Bresson here does not show a clear reason for Michel turning to stealing, as if the lad simply is the way he is, though he does hint that Michel feels superior to everyone else when he talks to the police chief and asks if certain special people should be allowed to get away with crimes.
The highlights are the highly focused, almost obssesive looking pickpocket sequences, filmed almost entirely without any sound and choreographed like a good ballet—in the first one, Michel conveniently sneaks up behind a woman's back and just stands there, ostensibly watching the horse race, while another gentleman is standing right next to him, observing the track with binoculars. The camera just lingers for almost a minute on Michel, motionlessly standing there, until he makes his move, like a predator, to slowly, carefully open the woman's purse and take the money away from it. It is a highly absorbing moment, and works flawlessly. Other pickpocket sequences, on the other hand, feel too naive and too fake to truly seem realistic—for instance, wouldn't a man notice when Michel steals a wallet from his jacket when the latter placed a newspaper on the man's chest in a subway train, and then folded it on him? Equally of a stretch are other pickpocket scenes, like when a man passes through a train corridor and the robbers take his wallet from the room department; Michel stopping in the middle of the street, grabbing a gentleman by his wrist and pulling him away from an incoming car (how did he know a car was not going to stop?) so that he won't notice he stole his wrist watch; or the moment where a woman wants to put her purse under her armpit, but the pickpockets just put a newspaper under her arm and take away the purse behind her back, handing it to each other. The third act makes for a character arc in which Michel stops selfishly thinking only about himself and starts caring about Jeanne and her baby, causing a transformation and Bresson's "redemption trademark" congruent to the director's Christian themes. For all of his questionable choices—including actors stripped of any kind of emotion or passion; a 'raw' style—Bresson would often compensate in his meditation on spiritual beings trapped in a cruel material world that forces them to suffer until they reach their own nirvana.
Grade:+++
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