Movies - Pickpocket

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	Movies - Pickpocket

Pickpocket is a 1959 film by the French director Robert Bresson. It starred nonprofessional actor Martin Lasalle in the title role, with Marika Green. The plot is essentially a modern-day, stripped-down (less than eighty minutes) version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, with theft substituted for murder as the crime which the hero commits to prove his superiority. As in Dostoyevsky's novel, the hero, Michel, has a strange, almost confessional relationship with the policeman who is hunting him, and is finally redeemed through love. As usual in Bresson's work, psychological analysis is eschewed in favour of deadpan acting and pared-down visuals in order to focus on the hero's spiritual regeneration.

Pickpocket exerted a formative influence over the work of Paul Schrader, who has described it as "an unmitigated masterpiece" and "as close to perfect as there can be", and whose films American Gigolo
, Patty Hearst
and Light Sleeper
all include endings similar to that of Pickpocket.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Pickpocket (film) ]

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