Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.
Bresson's Pickpocket is a landmark of austere cinema. Its cinematography is exceptional — the pickpocketing sequences are choreographed with hypnotic precision, the hands-in-motion editing achieving a near-balletic quality that remains singular in film history. Novelty is very high: Bresson's radical non-acting method, elliptical narration through voiceover, and stripped-down spiritual formalism create a wholly distinctive cinematic language that no one else has replicated with such consistency. The ending — a sudden, transcendent declaration of love through prison bars — is one of cinema's great grace-note conclusions. Plot is above average but deliberately thin by design; it functions more as a moral and spiritual skeleton than a conventional narrative. Acting, per Bresson's 'model' system, is intentionally flat and affectless — effective within his system but not conventionally strong, placing it in the above-average range given its purposeful nature.