"Pickpocket" - Film Review

The self-stated purpose of Pickpocket doesn’t take place until the final fifteen minutes. In that sense, much of the rest of the film doesn’t seem to surficially jive with what the master plot’s main aim is. It’s a romance disguised as a thriller disguised as a morality play (and even then Robert Bresson might just be mocking the way genres tell stories). In this sense, it’s much like a pickpocket; someone who disguises themselves as an ordinary person and while you’re not paying attention steals away your possessions.

The film is the story of a pickpocket’s escalating efforts of petty theft. During this time the police get more suspicious, he gets more paranoid and by befriending other pickpockets he becomes more deeply involved in a life of crime. 

It’s all told through narration, in flashback. The film shows writing down his memories of the events. In the hands of another director this might be a convenient plot device (in deed it does allow Bresson to gloss over large stretches of time, including a two year stint in London we never get to see any of). But Bresson uses this narration saturation to over-stylized specificity where it begins to transcend rather than simplify. The film is highly elliptical and economic in this way; it only tells what’s absolutely necessary, clocking in at just 75 minutes long. Yet it tells so much in that short time.  

The film is somewhat of a character study. Michel (Martin LaSalle) doesn’t seem like a terrible person. He’s a criminal but he’s not the smoothest operator. He gets caught on a few occasions, including by his mother, who he has trouble seeing. He likes the money he gets from the thefts but he hates the way people might see him. Michel isn’t a slimy person; he’s often sympathetic in spite of his lack of law-abiding. He comes off as too nervous to be in this line of work. Somewhere along the line someone or something or just society in general let him down. Michel does an awful lot of self-justifying, even at one point putting across an argument that certain special individuals are superman and deserve to get away with crime.  

His crimes, his pickpocketing, are on display for the majority of the film and there’s a strange gracefulness to the whole dirty deed. Bresson breaks down every little detail of the act and turns it into a balletic balancing act, highly coordinated, highly calculated.

Pickpocket is an examination of crime and redemption but the whole film seems just a little bit at arm’s length. There’s a distance away from the subject matter. Bresson isn’t making a judgment. He’s just telling it like it is. 

Grade: A-