Pickpocket (film)
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| Pickpocket | |
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| Directed by | Robert Bresson |
| Produced by | Agnès Delahaie |
| Written by | Robert Bresson |
| Starring | Martin LaSalle Marika Green Jean Pélégrit Dolly Scal Kassagi |
| Release date(s) | December, 1959 |
| Running time | 75 min |
| Language | French |
| IMDb profile | |
Pickpocket is a 1959 film by the French director Robert Bresson. It starred nonprofessional actor Martin Lasalle in the title role, with Marika Green.
[edit] Plot
The plot is essentially a modern-day, stripped-down (less than eighty minutes) version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, with theft substituted for murder as the crime which the hero commits to prove his superiority. As in Dostoyevsky's novel, the hero, Michel, has a strange, almost confessional relationship with the policeman who is hunting him, and is finally redeemed through love. As usual in Bresson's work, psychological analysis is eschewed in favour of deadpan acting and pared-down visuals in order to focus on the hero's spiritual regeneration.
[edit] Influence
Pickpocket exerted a formative influence over the work of Paul Schrader, who has described it as "an unmitigated masterpiece" and "as close to perfect as there can be", and whose films American Gigolo, Patty Hearst and Light Sleeper all include endings similar to that of Pickpocket.
[edit] External links
- Pickpocket at the Internet Movie Database
- Pickpocket at the Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films list
- Criterion Collection essay by Gary Indiana
- Roger Ebert's Great Movies Review
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