Critics reviews

The same way Michel's pickpocketing skills rely on slick deception by diverting one's attention from one's own pocket, Bresson focuses the audience on form, diverting your attention from the film's own narrative scheme. This forces the spectator to contrast and compare these two elements (narrative and form) simultaneously. We now associate this with what we call "Bressonian," and it is as compelling today as it was in 1959.

As in his previous film, A Man Escaped, Bresson's formal control here consistently astounds. Visually, he strives for... absolute clarity, to the point where the film could easily be followed with the sound turned off... [But the ending] It never really feels as if the film has been steadily building to this communion, and the moment may play as ecstatic as intended only for viewers inclined to perceive it symbolically, with Jeanne representing something much greater than just herself.

The action of its Dostoevskian protagonist, the self-justifying thief Michel (Martin LaSalle), propels the film with exciting sequences of pickpocketing that ease the viewer into Bresson's austere style. But even if he wasn't an effervescent aesthete, his filmmaking was perfectly attuned to his moral evaluations, andPickpocket remains one of the clearest examples of Bresson's minimalism evoking rich character and moral insights.

Bresson equates law breaking with erotic abandon. The director makes the tactile details of Michel's criminality unutterably pleasurable—the way his hand silently dives and swoops, absconding with wallets and enfolding them in elegantly creaseless newspapers. It's unusually gorgeous when Michel swiftly uses his thumb to unbuckle a watch from a wrist, followed by the sight of the loot strapped to a table leg in Michel's apartment like a simian tail wrapped around a tree branch.

Bresson produces an extraordinary quality of dreamlike estrangement via deliberately awkward stage direction (to the usual assortment of unfamiliar non-actors); shots of doors and other passageways that linger just a little too long before and after the characters' entrance and exit; and (especially) an obsessive attention to sound design which heightens the impact of every slight movement, above a perpetually noisy background of urban clatter.

The nimble crime of the title, perfected by a fiercely philosophical outlaw (Martin LaSalle), is itself a work of art, and Robert Bresson, in his 1959 film, reveals it, in all of its varieties, as a furtive street ballet.

Godard famously said Au Hasard Balthazar was "life in 90 minutes"; for me, though, Pickpocket was "my life in 75 minutes." It was my life to live but one I didn't necessarily want to—except I knew no other.

In Pickpocket, the society whose laws Michel breaks is far more criminal than he is—not technically, not legally, but spiritually: this is Bresson's archly comic irony, heavily veiled in nocturnal chiaroscuro. His film's tragedy, which is finally more important, is that Michel would like to feel guilty for his crimes, and would even like to love his mother, or Jeanne.

Bresson's meticulously chosen images are always concrete, functional bits of the material world. True, each of his films builds a complex symbolic structure, but they also create intelligible places, palpable milieus. You could read "Pickpocket" in strictly literal terms and come away with a finely detailed understanding of one man's existence in mid-century Paris: the layout of his home, the way he wears his clothes, how he moves in a crowd, bedroom, or cafe.

Bluntly put, to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it's to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago... Ultimately inexplicable, this concentrated, elliptical, economical movie is an experience that never loses its strangeness.

Michel is a superb figure of cinema. He is single-minded, obsessed, driven; but also an ascetic, bookworm intellectual. He is caught up in an escalating thrill that Bresson captures so well in each new, extravagant round of thievery – culminating in a veritable group-ballet of three pickpockets that rivals the finest piece of Hollywood musical choreography.

Lives and events in Pickpocket are not explained or motivated; the film's genius is in cutting such material away, leaving only direct presentation. The exhilarating virtuoso sequences of pickpocketing on the metro, in stations, and at the races are good examples of this.