Pickpocket (1959) on Netflix
In Paris, unemployed Michel picks pockets for the exhilaration. His friends Jacques and Jeanne urge him to visit his sick mother, and a stranger outside his flat proposes a partnership.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.5/1027,845 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
Michel is an unemployed young man in Paris who lives by stealing from strangers rather than taking the jobs his friend Jacques finds for him, which he considers beneath him. Jeanne, a neighbor of Michel's sick mother, and Jacques both ask him to visit her, and he makes excuses to stay away. At Longchamp Racecourse he steals money from a spectator and the police arrest him, though the chief inspector must release him for lack of proof. In a bar he asks Jacques to help him find work and boasts to the inspector about the escape, arguing that superior men are not bound by ordinary laws. He then watches a subway pickpocket and copies the technique, and a man loitering outside his flat proposes a profitable partnership.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Pickpocket (1959)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Henri Kassagi, the French-Tunisian pickpocket who served as technical advisor on Pickpocket and played the accomplice who instructs Michel, was too recognizable after the film to keep stealing, so he became a successful stage magician.
- Bresson wrote Pickpocket in three months and shot it amid real crowds in a minimal amount of time. The resulting disorder was a challenge, but the crew sometimes turned it to its advantage, as in the Gare de Lyon pickpocketing sequence.
- Bresson was supposedly inspired by Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, which is also about pickpockets, but that film did not reach French theaters until 1961, two years after Pickpocket. The two share a dying mother and the pickpocket as outsider.
- Paul Schrader's American Gigolo, Patty Hearst, Light Sleeper, First Reformed and The Card Counter all end similarly to Pickpocket, and his screenplay for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver shares its confessional narration and voyeuristic look at society.
- Christopher Nolan studied Pickpocket, along with Bresson's earlier A Man Escaped, while making his 2017 film Dunkirk, to see how Bresson created suspense through details.
