I think this review, by someone named "Count Marco", is already quoted in this thread a few pages back.
The 1950's brought us some powerful filmmaking from fresh new French directors who were often raised on American films, especially noir. Bresson's Pickpocket is not one of those great films. Contrary to the genre listings, it is decidedly NOT a "crime drama" and anyone expecting one will be disappointed. In fact, this pure "slice of life" experiment in naturalism doesn't pretend or attempt to be a "drama" at all. There is simply no plot and no attempt at plot. Yes, it looks and sounds like a kind of noir-inspired French crime movie, but it is not. No one smiles, no one has motivations, no plot evolves. There is beautiful artistry in the cinematography, and 1950's Paris has never looked better in black-and-white (including the subways), and the film offers a startlingly realistic look into the amazing skill of professional pickpockets. But that's it. Truth in advertising mandates calling this a great film for professional students of the development of French cinema. For the rest of us, it is painfully slow and numbingly dull. (The reviewers who praise this do so to maintain their artisitic "cred.")
Co-sign most of this, although I wouldn't presume to know exactly what is going on in the heads of the enthusiasts for this film. I have little to add, other than that if this film is great, it completely goes over, or perhaps under, my head, and that I think the culinary equivalent of this film would be something like trying to eat a raw log. Well, i'm not a beaver, Mr. Bresson. People aren't beavers. I'm just affirming it. Because, given how he allegedly directed his actors, that's something he clearly had a lot of trouble remembering. How can just stealing things be a religious experience? There's something puerile and Godardian about the notion, but fuck if i know what this film is supposed to be saying, or doing, or anything. Despite finding
Pickpocket incredibly dry and boring, it does also seem like a film directed by a crazy person. And with crazy, obsessed people in cinema, as in life, sometimes they're on to something, sometimes they have a point! And sometimes they don't! Sometimes they're just a ridiculous, misguided, incomprehensible freak, and that's how I feel about Bresson in this film. His emotional and intellectual or imaginative purpose here can simply not be plumbed on any level. The Pauline Kael/John Simon tack on Bresson seems best to me, that he was capable of brilliance, achieved it here and there, but that his cluelessness and weirdness and quirkiness and piousness often waylaid him, and are not as holy, or truthful, (one and the same?) as they are generally taken to be. But Kael and SImon are silent on this particular film. How can you be a mystic and so clueless? Does the word "mystic" have more than one meaning? His films reveal inner cluelessness, to me. I would have thought that the psychotic and ornery level of attention to detail, and sensitiveness to character, being a mystic requires would mean you're not clueless, at least not like that. Being a mystic is being hip and knowing what's what.
