elvircorhodzic PICKPOCKET is a touching crime drama about humanity and search for self-realization. Film was a loosely based on the novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The main protagonist is a lonely young man who has decided to become a pickpocket. His dying mother cherishes a young neighbor in whom the young man falls in love. He was arrested after a failed robbery. He was watched by local inspector. Soon, he becomes a member of a group of petty pickpockets...Bresson style is quite meticulous and somewhat minimalistic. The protagonists have offered a realistic story through cold emotions. It's hard to believe such relationships in the story. The motives and moral values are not clearly defined in this movie. However, extremely rich close-ups and landscapes are very impressive. Mr. Bresson has tried, through details on clothing, faces and hands, to induce abstract visual effects and natural sounds.Martin LaSalle as Michel is a good person, who is struggling with his own moral values. He is a man who does not know what to do with themselves. The theft was not achievement in his case. He does not need money in order to realize his dreams. This young man is searching for some meaning in his life.A second chance in life is a prison, while an awkward kiss is a kind of life redemption.

gavin6942 Michel (Martin LaSalle, the French equivalent of Montgomery Clift) is released from jail after serving a sentence for thievery. His mother dies and he resorts to pickpocketing as a means of survival.I freely confess I was not very familiar with the work of Robert Bresson. By which I mean I had not seen a single thing he did. This month (July 2013) that will be rectified, and this was the perfect place to start. Whether or not "Pickpocket" is a masterpiece is unclear, but it is Bresson's best-known work, and beautifully shot.I love how this film inspired Paul Schrader, who then used a scene not once but twice in his own work. That is pretty powerful. The film as a whole is great, with the focus on the hands and the use of great black and white (apparently Bresson's preferred medium, as he used it through the 1960s if not later).

Cosmoeticadotcom All in all, while the film is good- mainly on the strength of several bravura isolated scenes, it often comes off as something akin to Neo-Realism Lite. There is nothing of the real pathos nor insight that invests some of the classics from Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and the Italian classics that were made a decade before this film. Consequently, the film comes off as all head with little heart or soul, and, despite its occasional bravura moments, the film is not particularly deep, and especially so considering it against the titanic achievements of Mouchette and Au Hasard Balthazar. Also, there are numerous little moments that just clunk, starting with the film's titled opening, wherein words scrawl across the screen and tell us of what we are about to witness, that this film is not a thriller but a work of art about the communion of two souls. This overt invocation of Romantic bidungsromans just tanks, in and of itself, and because it utterly destroys the film's end. We know that Michel and Jeanne will end up together, and, worse, the film does not mitigate this solecism by providing a meaningful how the end is reach, even if we know what the end will be.So, Pickpocket is not a great film, much less a masterpiece, in any sense of the term that has relevance, but it is a film that shows potential for plumbing things at a level deeper than even films that are better realized. Unfortunately for it, and its viewers, that potential would only be realized in later Bresson offerings. Of course, there are certainly worse things in life, though. Ask Michel or his portrayer.

Robert J. Maxwell Some wag once suggested that civilization try to tap into the ontological Angst generated in the brain of Jean Paul Sartre and convert it into electrical energy. It would keep the City of Lights ablaze. Someone else suggested that France has three religions: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Atheism. I wonder if the two proposals aren't in some way congruent. Look at it this way. The whole purpose of religion is to keep you feeling guilty enough to support it. The Atheists don't have that kind of guilt, so they feel guilty about not having it. And all that existential spontaneity? Pure denial. Is it any wonder that Sartre bit his nails? I'd never seen any of Robert Bresson's work, though I'd often seen it referred to, and I was a little wary of watching this one. I thought it would turn out to be some highbrow allegory with no picking of pockets at all, just a mutual picking of equally gloomy minds, and all of it taking place in the rain.But actually, Michel LaSalle, is really a pickpocket. He's alienated from everyone else, lives alone in a crummy flat, visits his dying mother only reluctantly. He makes what I think is called a distant acquaintance of an alluring neighbor, Marika Green, who is tending Michel's mother out of compassion.Michel falls in with a couple of other pickpockets and there are several close ups of hands lifting wallets and unsnapping watches and slipping them into a confederate's pocket. The confederates aren't friends. They don't smile or laugh. Nobody laughs. They silently go about their routines, like the pod people in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or guests at a Seder hosted by Lutherans.Michel has already been caught once by the cops, who release him with a warning, but they continue to taunt him, following him around, trapping him finally at a race track. At one point, the Chief Inspector, Jean Pelegri, visits Michel and tells him the story of a boy who went bad. "Who was it?" "Why, it was you," replies the inspector.Well, Michel is a skinny, sensitive-looking young guy who tortures himself over his criminal acts, reads books, and he and his neighbors are very poor, and in other ways the endoskeleton of "Crime and Punishment" shows through the jailhouse pallor of the story. But that's okay.Still, all the way through, I kept trying to imagine how Michel, with no other source of income except what he picks off others in public, and what he earlier stole from his own mother, could subsist at all, especially after he starts having to split the take three ways with his two colleagues, about whom he knows nothing of importance. I mean, you can't WEAR half a dozen watches on your wrist. You have to hock them or fence them, right? And then you get ten centimes on the dollar? And how much can you make lifting wallets from strangers on the Metro, even if you're good at it? To prove it's a difficult way to make a living, I now extract my own wallet from my right rear trouser pocket (not from the easily picked breast pockets that Michel keeps sliding his fingertips in) and how much do I have? Let me see. Eighty-two dollars! Wait a minute. Is this somebody ELSE'S wallet? Nope. Wow. Must have cashed a big check lately. You'll have to take my word for it that the usual amount only infrequently runs to double digits.The Introduction tells us that this movie is not a policier (which the subtitles translate as "thriller") but a story of two souls finding each other. One soul, of course, is Michel. The other is Marika Green as Jeanne. Now, Marika Green has the face -- the cherubic lips and large bright eyes -- of one of those old-fashioned dolls made of porcelain. Any man would happily throw himself at her feet and grovel, though I'm not sure about Michel. But, boy, if this romance is supposed to be the heart of the story, it is very clumsily handled. It's anything but organic. The two have exchanged only a few words before, and I don't think they've ever touched, yet at the end they go into a clinch and there is a big smooch. Maybe it's an existential act.Anyway, if I tried hard enough, I could find plenty of covert messages behind this slow, dullish, and rather uninvolving movie. But I'd never be sure I wasn't committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, seeing clusters of meaning where none exist.In an introduction to the Criterion Edition, Paul Schrader lauds the film because it violates the viewer's expectations regarding editing, plot, facial expressions, emotional involvement, and so forth. The usual movie conventions are discarded. He must have loved Andy Warhol's "Empire", which is a single shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day, more than eight hours long. That'll violate your expectations for you.Worth watching once, if only because it's widely recognized as an important film.