I've reviewed seven other Robert Bresson films (out of the thirteen feature length films he made). I rated one at five-stars (A Man Escaped), five at four-stars (Diary of a Country Priest, Au Hasard, Balthazar, A Gentle Woman, Lancelot of the Lake, and L’Argent), and one at just two-stars (The Devil, Probably). Some critics hold Bresson in higher esteem than my ratings would indicate. Bresson was one of those directors that some film critics adore but who excites relatively little interest among the general viewing public. For my taste, some Bresson films are a good deal more worthy than others. Pickpocket (1959) ranks among the most successful of Bresson's films, from my viewpoint.

Historical Background: Robert Bresson was such a meticulous craftsman as a filmmaker that he only completed thirteen full-length films over a forty year career. There was also one medium length film early in his career and an unfinished fragment from his final year. The last eleven of his completed films were Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), A Gentle Creature (1969), Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Lancelot of the Lake (1974), The Devil Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), all considered to be important films.

Bresson's works tend to be thematically and stylistically difficult, preoccupied as they are with moral, religious, or existential issues. Bresson's special gift for creating spiritual meanings from simple images and vignettes is especially evident in Pickpocket. His minimalist approach gives viewers little reason to be distracted from thematic content. Bresson drew inspiration for several of his films from the likes of Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy. Pickpocket, for example, was inspired by Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. Except in his first two films, Bresson used non-professional actors, which he called "models," to satisfy his vision of a more natural kind of performance (relatively expressionless and emotionally flat delivery) than he had been getting from the professionals. Bresson forgoes establishing shots, such as panoramas or aerial views, which means that viewers have to participate actively in the viewing experience if they want to be able to follow the storyline. Action and dialog are both sparse. Soundtracks typically consist of preexisting classical music. Pickpocket, for example, features music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, from the opera Atys.

The Story: Michel (Martin LaSalle) is a soft-spoken young man who feels alone in life, disconnected from his fellow man. At a Parisian racetrack, he gazes at the crowd until he spots a well-dressed middle-aged woman stuffing some notes into her handbag. Michel screws up his courage, sidles up behind her, and slowly inches open the clasp on her bag. Soon, he is gleefully leaving the track with her stack of bills and a sense of good fortune. Michel's euphoria is cut short when two policemen haul him down to the station for questioning, but later he is released for lack of evidence. Thus begins Michel's life as a pickpocket.

Michel, who lives in a small flat with little more than a cot and a few books (including one about the famous pickpocket, Barrington), seeks out an old friend, Jacques (Pierre Leymarie), who is an honest sort of lad with a real job. Michel asks if Jacques can help him find a real job. Jacques, who knows Michel well enough to be skeptical, obliges with an address where Michel could get a start. On the Metro, however, Michel observes a master pickpocket at work. Michel is impressed with the man's skill and bravado and becomes intrigued by the impulse to master the technique himself. He's pretty much of a loner anyway, so he closes himself up in his room, except for meals, and practices the stranger's technique until he has become adept at it. Soon, Michel is working the crowds on the Metro for himself, as a petty thief, as much for the rush as for the income. Since men in Europe mostly keep their wallets in their breast pockets, the technique requires a face-to-face approach and a lot of nerve.

One day, Michel picks the pocket of a well-dressed man, but as we walks away in apparent success, the man catches up with him and demands his wallet back. Otherwise, he'll call the police. Michel ponders how to respond to the ultimatum, but finally returns the man's wallet and walks away. Later, Michel spots the man and they quickly become friends, because the man (Kassagi) is a pickpocket as well. Kassagi is much more advanced in his techniques and begins to teach Michel his art. Michel practices and trains and learns how to increase the suppleness of his fingers. Kassagi and Michel team up together and gradually expand their enterprise with a third accomplice (Pierre Étaix). In one tour-de-force scene, the three pickpockets fleece a whole series of hapless travelers at a train station.

Meanwhile, Michel's personal life reflects his confusion and identity crisis. His aging mother (Dolly Scal) is ill and is being cared for by a young neighbor, Jeanne (Marika Green). Michel is too ashamed of his activities to visit his mother, as he should, afraid that she'll ask him questions about how he is doing. Jeanne is ostensibly Jacques's girlfriend, but she is more genuinely attuned to Michel's suffering and she worries about his self-destructive course in life. "You're not living in this world," Jeanne tells him.

Michel also engages in quasi-philosophical conversations with the Police Inspector (Jean Pelegri), who had questioned him after the racetrack incident. The Inspector is intrigued by Michel's rationalization as to why petty theft is justifiable. Without admitting to any such activity himself, Michel asserts that some men of superior intelligence simply have to allowed to do as they please according to the dictates of their own consciences. The Inspector, whose view has less to do with philosophy than his own long experience with criminals, well understands where Michel's contempt for limitations will inevitably end. This cat-and-mouse game with the Inspector is part of how Michel masks his self-loathing in a charade of superiority and invulnerability.

When Jeanne is asked to go to the police station for questioning, Michel admits to her that he is nothing more than a common thief. In fact, he had begun by stealing from his own mother, though she had dropped her police complaint when she learned that her own son was the guilty party. With the police closing in, Michel runs off to Milan, Rome and then London, but returns to Paris two years later, still broke and shiftless. He discovers that Jane is now pregnant with Jacques's baby, but has refused to marry Jacques, who has, in turn, abandoned her. Her family also wants nothing to do with her. Michel offers to help her with the baby, but she turns him down, recognizing that he is unfit to be a partner.

Michel returns to working the Metro, but his luck runs out when one of his marks turns out to be an undercover detective. Actually, his luck is just beginning. In jail, he has time to contemplate the foolishness of his approach to life. At first he is merely angry that he had not been on his guard. Later, however, he begins to recognize the consequences of his transgressions. Jeanne comes to visit Michel in jail because, as she says, "I have only you." Michel, still waffling between caring and fear-of-caring, declares, "Must I admit that I'm bad, and that you win? I don't need anyone! Don't go!" Later, alone in his cell, recalling his mother, he writes, "There was something I hadn't told her. Why should I live? I hadn't decided yet." Jeanne's sick baby keeps her away for a few weeks, but she returns as soon as she can. No longer lost, the two gently kiss through the bars of the cell. "O, Jeanne," says Michel, "In order to reach you, what a strange way I had to take."

Themes: Using just a simple story with minimal accoutrements, Bresson creates a penetrating meditation on the human condition. This is no crime thriller, but a psychological treatise. Moral systems are typically based on either religion or humanism. Lacking both of these, young Michel was truly adrift. Michel declares that he once believed in God – "For about three minutes," he adds. "Judged? After what law? It's absurd," he argues. Michel also feels detached from the rest of humanity, floundering about in existential isolation and angst. In fact, Michel's only physical contact with other human beings consists of the furtive finger flicks by which he removes their wallets or watches from them.

With no solid moorings, Michel falls back on two classic psychological maneuvers to stay afloat. First, he resorts to the emotional thrill of courting danger, by challenging the law, to feel alive. He becomes the quintessential rebel-without-a-cause. Second, he uses the pretense of intellectual superiority to disguise his pervasive feelings of worthlessness. Michel's mother was probably the only person in the world who truly loved him, as the film opens, and he loses her part way through the story. With no father to impose limits (as a manifestation of "tough-love"), Michel will persist in his compulsive delinquency until he experiences the restrictions of a substitute father – the law – as embodied in the compassionate Police Inspector.

Fortunately, Michel has not permanently destroyed his hopes for resolving his existential struggle. He finds redemption in the combination of just limitations on his thrill-seeking behavior and reattachment to humanity through his newfound love for Jeanne (and hers for him). Though one reviewer refers to the ending as "anticlimactic," I'm can't myself think of what is any more profound than redemption of a lost soul through love. In the end, it is his confinement in a jail cell that frees Michel from the prison of his own loneliness and obsessions.

Production Values: The beauty of minimalism is that the suppression of big effects heightens the impact of little nuances. The dialog in Pickpocket is sparse and the performances relatively flat, yet, through mere gestures and inflections, we fully understand the cauldron of emotions that are boiling inside the protagonist. If he seems placid and uncertain in his outward behavior, those qualities aptly reflect the state of confusion in which this young man languishes. This film depicts a rite-of-passage by which a lost soul matures into a young man with purpose. Little background about the lad is provided and his thoughts and motivations sometimes remain obscure, but no less for himself than for viewers.

The cinematography is on the dark side in keeping with the stark and harsh psychological struggle in which Michel is engaged. There is little in the way of fancy camerawork. The soundtrack featuring music by Lully is appealing and appropriate.

All of the performers in this film were non-professionals. Martin LaSalle, as Michel, is the standout, providing a solid and mesmerizing performance. His blank slate intensity leaves viewers with plenty of room to work with as they try to surmise what the lad is feeling inside. LaSalle later became a bearded recluse in Mexico and described his experience in Pickpocket as the best of his life, though it took him some 10-15 years to recover from it. Pierre Leymarie, who played Jacques as summer employment, went on to become the head of a genetic research laboratory. Marika Green was suitably appealing and warm as Jeanne.

Bottom-Line: There's a DVD version of Pickpocket that includes some stellar "extras," but as best as I can ascertain, it is available only in a Region 2 format. Those of you in Britain and Australia would be well advised to seek out that version. It's available at e-bay, among other places. It includes an interview with Bresson from 1960 as well as a featurette offering interviews with each of the three leading cast members. There's also a post-screening discussion involving Marika Green and two filmmakers, who are also avid fans of this film. Then there's an eleven-minute cabaret performance by the magician Kassagi, who plays one of Michel's pickpocket accomplices in Pickpocket, demonstrating his sleight-of-hand techniques. For those requiring Region 1 playback compatibility, it looks like you're stuck with some rather mediocre VHS options.

This film has none of the "cool" approach of grifter films like The Sting or Nine Queens. Instead, it bristles with tension and anxiety. It's quick paced, at just 73 minutes in length, which is rare for a Bresson film. Pickpocket is in French with English subtitles. I highly recommend it, especially for those who have the capacity to decode the Region 2 DVD version.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older