100 All-Time Films (To see the entire list, click here)
Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959)
I watched this movie for the first time not knowing anything about it. It had a Criterion label so that was a good enough stamp of approval for me. French director Robert Bresson directed Pickpocket, the story of a man who gets through life by, well… pickpocketing. It isn’t a very flashy movie but had a very original feel to it.
The main character Michel isn’t a bad man, he just has an addiction and really needs help. Bresson humanizes Michel enough so that when he is stealing, we root for his success even though we know its wrong. In a way he echoes Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The film uses a confessional narrative and has a voyeuristic look at society much like a famous film I will be discussing soon in Taxi Driver. The voyeurism is what makes this film stand out to me.
In a Hitchcockian way, Bresson focuses the camera on items and hands during the pickpocketing scenes. We’ll get closeups of people’s faces but the art is in watching the hands. With the camera holding long on an actual pickpocketing action, we see the full beauty and danger involved in the skill. It heightens the realism and emphasizes the actions of the characters.
Michel steals because it makes him feel alive. When he doesn’t, he feels completely isolated in a world where he perceives his possibilities as rigidly limited. It’s an uncommon way of looking at life but perfectly exemplified in Pickpocket.
