The Cinematheque

“A film of dazzling originality … If you deny this film, it is cinema itself as an autonomous art that you call into question.”

Louis Malle

In a body of work full of major achievements, Pickpocket definitely ranks as a chef d’oeuvre: legendary critic Richard Roud called it Bresson’s masterpiece, Cahiers du cinéma voted it the greatest French film of the postwar era, and its influence can be traced across many a disciple’s career, not least Paul Schrader’s. Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and shot on the streets of Paris at the same time Godard was making Breathless, Pickpocket concerns a compulsive young man (Martin LaSalle) who, having rejected God and convinced himself of his moral superiority to others, takes up the life of a thief—until the love of a young woman offers him the hope of redemption. Bresson’s precise depictions of the mechanics of pickpocketing (“ballets of thievery,” said Jean Cocteau) have a real erotic and spiritual charge. Typical of the director’s work, the film eschews the conventional psychology that would ​“explain” its protagonist’s actions.

In French with English subtitles

“Timeless, achieving a state of spiritual grace rarely seen, or even contemplated, in the secular medium of cinema.”

A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“One of [Bresson’s] greatest and purest films, full of hushed transgression and sudden grace … Awesome, austere power.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader