Pickpocket (1959)

It is hard to come up with anything bad to say about Bresson's Pickpocket. It is a marvellous film in several different ways, most of all, of course, because of Bresson's sense for cinematic purity - a purity in sounds, images and storytelling. Pickpocket is Bresson's love affair with Dostoyevsky. Young frantic man. The man starts a career as a pickpocket. Not for any particular reason. Yes he is poor, but there are other ways to make money. He makes theft an art, a form of dance. Together with another man, about whom he knows next to nothing, he swirls around people, gracefully digging their coats and handing over their belongings to his partner, as if in a strange dance. At the same time, we know his mother is ill. He doesn't want to see her, and instead he gets to talk to her neighbor. The pickpocket knows he is being scrutinizes by police officers. Defiantly, he offers himself for scrutiny. In one scene, we see him discussing about the justice of crime with a police inspector. In the end, he is caught, imprisoned - and there, the girl visits him in the jail, and something overwhelming happens.

- - A worse director would have made a terribly sentimental film about a young man who falls in love and finds moral redemption. Bresson is not that director. For him, every frame is important, every frame leads up to the very last, important one.Throughout the film, we gaze into the pickpocket's face. He seems to have only one expression. It is his movements that are expressive of the world - or lack of world - he inhabits; how he walks up the stairs, or how he drags his bed a few inches so as to acess his secret stash of money. Bresson lingers with every small twitch of the body, enhancing some of the surroundings by a quite stylized world of sounds: the sound of step, the creaking bed or the droning sounds of the city. In this way, the pickpocket's state is not reduced to a psychological set of situations. Bressons shows us much more, an existential predicament. I was surprised at how far the film's depiction of love as redemption strays from the common sexist image of the Woman who saves the lost soul, the Man, with her otherworldly goodness. Bresson's Jeanne is not like that. There is nothing otherworldly or saintly about her. She is an ordinary person who does nothing out of the ordinary - yet, something happens in that prison.

Pickpocket - a rigorous, direct and beautiful film. If you haven't seen it - you are in for something good.