Sightlines · reception
How Pickpocket was received
1959 · Robert Bresson · Pickpocket on Sightlines
The arc
Parisian critics were split in 1959 — many found its blank acting and 75-minute austerity baffling — but the New Wave generation championed it, and it's since become the consensus pick for Bresson's masterpiece, a fixture of greatest-films polls.
What’s debated
The eternal Bresson fight: is the deliberately affectless 'model' acting transcendent purity or emotionally inert tedium — the film cinephiles most often use to sort the converted from the bored.
Its footprint
Paul Schrader has spent a whole career remaking its final scene — American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and First Reformed all end on the Pickpocket ending — and he routinely names it his favorite film; the closing line about the strange path taken is one of art cinema's most quoted.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' pillar of the arthouse canon — the standard gateway drug into Bresson and a Criterion-shelf badge of seriousness.
Did you know? The dazzling pickpocketing sequences were choreographed by Kassagi, a real sleight-of-hand artist who served as technical advisor and appears in the film — while lead Martin LaSalle was a total non-professional, in keeping with Bresson's use of untrained 'models'.