Pickpocket

Robert Bresson, France 1959,  75 minutes

Rating: PG coarse language, sexual references

Robert Bresson’s brilliantly pared-down and powerfully austere study of a compulsive pickpocket Michel (Martin Lassalle), who achieves an unlikely redemption through the love of a sympathetic woman (Marika Green). Shot in 1959 on the streets of Paris, and the first of the French director’s films not to be an adaptation of a literary text, it features a cast of deliberately inexpressive non-professional actors… There’s a dream-like quality to the monochrome Pickpocket, which lasts for just 75 minutes: it’s impossible to gauge how much time passes between sequences, whilst Bresson uses sound and music sparingly to heighten the mysterious atmosphere.
– Tom Dawson, BBC, 03 April 2005.

Thanks to Institut Français