Cinema
Pickpocket
Robert Bresson · 1959
Synopsis
Michel, a lonely, unemployed young Parisian, commits his first theft at the Longchamp racecourse. He neglects his sick mother, who is cared for by a neighbour, Jeanne, and rebuffs his friend Jacques, who urges him to look for work. A police inspector keeps him in sight. Michel practises obstinately and, initiated by a seasoned thief, perfects his art, until he works in a gang among the travellers at the Gare de Lyon.
Context
The film is freely inspired by Crime and Punishment, from which it takes the hero's intellectual justification of crime. Bresson gave the roles to non-professional performers, among them Martin LaSalle as Michel, and asked them to speak their lines with as little expression as possible. The pickpocket Henri Kassagi, adviser on the thieves' gestures, appears in the famous sequence shot in a Paris railway station. Paul Schrader paid tribute to the film in the screenplay of Taxi Driver.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and a quarter, with deliberately neutral acting; the gestures of the hands count for more than the dialogue.
Prizes and reception
Released on 16 December 1959; Criterion reissued it on Blu-ray in May 2024, after an earlier DVD.
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