Pickpocket (1959)
Directed by Robert Bresson
Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.
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What critics compared Pickpocket to
There are other films where the intensity of being inside someone is delivered: in so many Robert Bresson films—like Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket—we inhabit the spiritual suspense of the central characters.
On this evidence the French writer-director Eugène Green (small previous oeuvre unknown to me) may be the reincarnation of Robert Bresson, master of the gnomically poetic (Pickpocket, Mouchette).
Think “Two-Lane Blacktop” meets Kubrick’s “The Killing” meets Bresson’s “Pickpocket” and you’ll have some idea of what’s in store.
Branagh has never been a stranger to bombast, whether he was doing Shakespeare (think of the bellowing portent of Henry V , or the careening cameras and swirling orchestral crescendos of Much Ado About Nothing ) or making a period horror adaptation ( Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so visually histrionic it makes Bram Stoker’s Dracula look like Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket ).
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This film screened at the Melbourne Cinémathèque on August 23, 8:10 p.m. © RJ Thompson 2000 Endnotes (1) I have written elsewhere about the film's connections with Bresson's Pickpocket (1959): Senses of Cinema Issue 7 May 2000 - "Pickpocket"…