Pickpocket ***** (1959, Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri) – Classic Movie Review 10,923

Writer-director Robert Bresson’s spare, stark and enigmatic 1959 French film Pickpocket is rightly considered to be one of the great film-maker’s greatest films.

The young Uruguayan non-professional actor Martin LaSalle stars as the Pickpocket, with Marika Green as Jeanne, Jean Pélégri as Chief Inspector, Dolly Scal as The Mother and Pierre Leymarie as Jacques.

It is Bresson’s first original screenplay rather than adapting it from an existing text, though he must have had Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in mind when he wrote it. Style dominates the plot or is at least equally important. One of the film’s finest virtues is the beautifully fluid black and white cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel.

Martin LaSalle stars as Michel, who takes up picking pockets as a hobby but is soon arrested though released by the inspector (Jean Pélégri) through lack of evidence. Michel does not want to see his ailing mother, but after she dies, he goes to the funeral, and then rejects the support of his friends Jeanne (Marika Green) and Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) in favour of returning to pickpocketing.

Bresson recalled that Pickpocket ‘was written in three months and shot in the midst of crowds in a minimal amount of time.’ That proved a shooting challenge but was sometimes used to advantage, as in the Gare de Lyon sequence.

Paul Schrader declared it as ‘an unmitigated masterpiece’… ‘as close to perfect as there can be’ and it is an influence on many of his films.

It runs just 75 minutes.

The films of Robert Bresson: Angels of Sin (1943), Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), A Gentle Woman (1969), Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Lancelot du Lac (1974), The Devil Probably (1977) and L’Argent (1983).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,923

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