![]() Why do we steal? Is theft always wrong? Can those who break society's moral codes ever be at ease? These are the sorts of questions prompted by Bresson's intricately detailed film. On one such visit, Michel realizes he is in love with her. Jeanne regularly goes to visit him in jail. Michel begins to work again to support her, but gives into temptation and goes back to steal at the horse track, where he is caught by a plainclothes policeman. Returning to France, Michel returns to Jeanne, who has had a child by Jacques but did not want to marry him and is now left with nothing. Slow and steady: The final pickpocket scene He tries hard to make an honest living, but throws his earnings away on alcohol and women. The inspector leaves without arresting Michel, who decides to leave the country. Later, the inspector visits Michel in his apartment, and tells him that his mother had had some money stolen, but later dropped the charges, probably knowing the thief was her son. Michel's mother dies, and he goes to the funeral with Jeanne. Michael's girl friend Jeanne realizing the bitter truth However, the cops failed to find his stash of money. Michel goes back to his apartment realizing that it was all just a ruse to search his apartment. Once there, the inspector barely glances at the book. While in a bar the inspector asks Michel to show him a book by George Barrington about pickpocketing at the station on a convenient morning and Michel goes down to the police station with it. But after stealing a watch, Michel leaves Jacques and Jeanne at the carnival. His friend Jacques goes on a date with Jeanne and invites Michel along. Visiting his mother, Michel meets Jeanne (Marika Green) who begs him to visit his mother more often. The three Pickpocketers at a card session Michel soon falls in with a small group of professional pickpockets, who teach him their trade and invite him to join them on highly-coordinated pickpocketing sprees in crowded public areas. The inspector (Jean Pélégri) releases Michel because the evidence is not strong enough Michel says it's not a crime to have cash. He leaves the racetrack confident he was not caught when he's suddenly arrested. Michel (Martin LaSalle) goes to a horse race and steals some money from a spectator. The lenient Police Officer (left) along with Michael and his friend Rather, it is a powerful, profound search for meaning and spiritual enlightenment by a man who believes in nothing but himself. Pickpocket is no thriller, though Bresson offers impressive, meticulously detailed scenes of daring and intimate robberies (one sequence on a subway feels like homage to Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street). To put it in a biblical phrase that Bresson would probably like, his heart of stone gets replaced with one of flesh.īresson's direction of his "models" (as he calls his nonprofessional performers) strips them of affectation and motivation, making them blank slates defined by the accumulation of precisely drilled actions and words. He becomes a pickpocket, eventually throws his hand in with a gang, and is finally caught and thrown into jail where, with the help of a young woman's love, he realizes that he neither has nor wants the stuff to be an ubermensch. Like Raskolnikov, although without the Russian character's horrible transgression, he begins to live outside the law. ![]() He is an ubermensch, above the norms of morality and society. A young intellectual convinces himself that he wants neither human attachments nor conventional lifestyle. Robert Bresson drew inspiration from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for this examination of an arrogant young pickpocket who deems himself above the laws and conditions of ordinary men. It's easy to sense the fascination and perhaps even the admiration of the director as he choreographs the movements of two and later three pickpockets working together on Paris trains and at a racetrack. Robert Bresson uses in this one the intensely physical to explore the deeply philosophical.ĭepicted with an almost clinical attention to detail, the pickpocketing sequences are amazing and beautiful. " Pickpocket," like so many of Bresson's films, is a combination of visual story-telling and narrative overlay and is certainly his finest and most accessible film. Director: Robert Bresson / France/French/75 mts ![]()
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