“To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice.   Read full review here

“DON’T MISS! Bresson’s terse classic…
plays out like a Russian novel stripped of all pretensions.
A rigorous look at one man’s journey becomes a liberating experience for all.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York

“The nimble crime of the title, perfected by a fiercely philosophical outlaw,
is itself a work of art, and Robert Bresson reveals it, in all of its varieties,
as a furtive street ballet.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker   Read full review here

“Bresson’s parable of crime and redemption... is timeless,
achieving a state of spiritual grace rarely seen, or even contemplated,
in the secular medium of cinema.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

(1959) Some men are above the law. “But how do they know who they are?” “They ask themselves.” But if Martin Lassalle’s Michel seems outstanding only for his arrogance and detachment, there are feelings and reasonings we only learn about by increments and accretion in a film that director Robert Bresson firmly declared not a thriller, even if it does chronicle a young man’s rise and fall as a master pickpocket. If suspense was not unknown in the works of arguably the most austere of major directors (check out the prison break in A Man Escaped), little in his previous oeuvre could prepare us for what amounts to a tour-de-force action scene, a series of takings, passings, and disposals in the actual Gare de Lyon done with amazing sleight of hand, including a purse moved almost immediately through three sets of hands; a wallet taken, dropped in a passer-by’s pocket, then finally taken again; a wallet taken, plucked, then returned empty. (If the light-fingered “boosting” looks authentic, credit the singly-named Kassagi, a presumably reformed criminal master and the film’s technical adviser, who also plays Michel’s criminal mentor).

This was Bresson’s first completely original script (he eventually realized the unconscious inspiration from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) although he provides his own literary genesis in Michel’s diary (or is it a statement?), which provides the narration. Analogies between Hollywood moviemaking and Bresson seldom come to mind, but if the prison conclusion seems familiar, Paul Schrader (whose early critical work Transcendental Cinema highlighted his deep respect for Bresson) has acknowledged that Pickpocket directly influenced his American Gigolo screenplay, as well as Taxi Driver’s. “Black-and-white images in the summer sun... of hands flexing uncontrollably, of eyes opaque to the camera’s gaze... all part of a diary/flashback that is in the process of being ‘written’ by the thief himself in prison. Read it as an allegory on the insufficiency of human reason; as a tone poem on displaced desire.” – Chris Auty, Time Out (London).
A JANUS FILMS RELEASE
3:00, 6:35, 10:10

Return to FRENCH CRIME WAVE Series

• Robert Bresson's MOUCHETTE
• Listen to Paul Schrader talking about Bresson on ‘The Leonard Lopate Show’