Pickpocket [1959 film]

An arrogant man is obsessed with pickpocketing.

There's some great suspense in the beginning, but it very quickly deteriorates into pretentious crap. Bresson deliberately alienates the audience every chance he gets.

Concept: B
Story: C
Characters: D
Dialog: B
Pacing: C
Cinematography: B
Special effects/design: B
Acting: D
Music: A

Enjoyment: C minus

GPA: 2.4/4

The anti-hero has few friends and is too ashamed to visit his dying mother. The only pleasure he derives is from his compulsive work as a pickpocket, and it is in these scenes that Bresson stuns us with his martinet control of both narrative pacing and camera placement. The director lovingly shows us the subtle skills of the street thief: the creeping hands, the split-second scams (such as lifting a wallet from a man's suit breast-pocket while standing next to him and pretending to read a newspaper), the choreographed celerity of movement when the thief works with his partners in crime. There's one sequence that follows LaSalle and his two accomplices from a train station all the way to the train, in which they lift about 15 wallets and show more the occasional purse. The camera-work and editing here is nothing less than sheer mastery -- a ballet of thievery. show less