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One of the early images in Robert Bresson's “Pickpocket” (1959)shows the unfocused eyes of a man obsessed by excitement and fear. The man's name is Michel. He lives in Paris in a small room under the eaves, a garret almost filled by his cot and his books. He is about to commit a crime. He wants to steal another man's wallet, and he wants his face to appear blank, casual.Perhaps it would, to a casual observer. But we know him and what he is about todo, and in his eyes we see the trance like ecstasy of a man who is surrendering to his compulsion.

Or do we? Bresson, one of the most thoughtful and philosophical of directors, was fearful of “performances” by his actors. He famously forced the star of “ A Man Escaped ” (1956) to repeat the same scene some 50 times,until it was stripped of all emotion and inflection. All Bresson wanted was physical movement. No emotion, no style, no striving for effect. What we see in the pickpocket's face is what we bring to it. Instead of asking his actors to “show fear,” Bresson asks them to show nothing, and depends on his story and images to supply the fear.

Martin Lassalle , the star of “Pickpocket,” plays Michel as an unexceptional man with a commonplace face. He is not handsome or ugly or memorable. He usually wears a suit and tie, disappears in a crowd and has few friends. To one of them, in a cafe, he wonders aloud if it is all right for an “extraordinary man” to commit a crime--just to get himself started?

Michel is thinking of himself. He could probably get a job in a day if he wanted one. But he does not. He gathers his narcissism around himself like a blanket. He sits in his garret and reads his books, and treasures an image of himself as a man so special that he is privileged to steal from others. Also, of course, he gets an erotic charge out of stealing. On the Metro or at the racetrack, he stands as close as possible to his victims, sensing their breathing, their awareness of him. He waits for a moment of distraction,and then opens their purses or slips their wallets from their coats. That is his moment of release, of triumph over a lesser person--although of course his face never reflects joy.

In this story you may sense echoes of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment , another story about a lonely intellectual who lived in a garret and thought he had a license, denied to common men, to commit crimes. Bresson's Michel, like Dostoyevsky's hero Raskolnikov, needs money in order to realize his dreams, and sees no reason why some lackluster ordinary person should not be forced to supply it. The reasoning is immoral, but the characters claim special privileges above and beyond common morality.

Michel, like the hero of Crime and Punishment, has a good woman in his life, who trusts he will be able to redeem himself. The woman in “Pickpocket” is named Jeanne ( Marika Green ). She is a neighbor of Michel's mother, and the lover of Michel's friend Jacques ( Pierre Leymarie ). She comes to Michel with the news that his mother is dying. Michel does not want to see his mother, but gives Jeanne money for her. Why does he avoid her? Bresson never supplies motives. We can only guess. Perhaps she shames him with her simplicity. Perhaps she makes it impossible for him to think of himself as an extraordinary man,alone in the world. Does he avoid her because of arrogance, or fear?

Another character in the movie is a police inspector ( Jean Pelegri ) who has his eye on Michel. They play a delicate cat-and-mouse scene together in which the inspector implies that he knows Michel is a thief, and Michel more or less admits it. Together they examine an ingenious tool designed by a master pickpocket to slit open coat pockets. The inspector is on Michel's case, and Michel, we sense, wants to be caught.

Shoplifters and pickpockets operate in different emotional weather than more brazen thieves. They do not use strength, but stealth. Their thefts are intimate violations of the property of others; to succeed, they must either remain invisible or inspire trust. There is something sexual about it. It's no coincidence that when another pickpocket spots Michel at work and confronts him, it is in a men's room; their liaison involves money as a substitute for sex. And later, when a police decoy at the racetrack shows Michel a pocketful of cash, Michel suspects the man is a cop (“He didn't even bet on the winning horse!”). But he tries to pick his pocket anyway, and when the cop slaps on handcuffs, it's as if that's what Michel hoped for.

Bresson was born in 1907 and is still alive. He made his last film, “L'Argent,” in 1983, and it won a special prize at Cannes. He has been called the most Christian of filmmakers. Most of his films deal, in one way or another, with redemption. In “ Diary of a Country Priest ” (1950), a dying young priest confronts his death by focusing on the lives of others. In “A Man Escaped” (1956), based on a true story of the resistance, an imprisoned patriot acts as if his soul is free. In the great “Mouchette” (1966), a young girl--an outcast in her village and a victim of rape--finds a way to shame her enemies.In addition to “Pickpocket's” parallels to Crime and Punishment, Bresson has made two films directly based on Dostoyevsky: “Une Femme Douce” (1969) and “Four Nights of a Dreamer” (1973).

“Pickpocket” is about a man who deliberately and self-consciously tries to operate outside morality (“Will we be judged? By what law?”). Like many criminals, he does it for two conflicting reasons: because he thinks he is better than others, and because--fearing he is worse--he seeks punishment. He avoids Jeanne because she is wholly good, and therefore a threat to him. “These bars, these walls, I don't even see them,” he tells her. But he does, and is healed by the touch of her hand. (The famous last line: “Oh, Jeanne, what a strange way I had to take to meet you!”)

There is incredible buried passion in a Bresson film, but he doesn't find it necessary to express it. Also great tension and excitement,tightly reined in. Consider a sequence in which a gang of pickpockets, including Michel, works on a crowded train. The camera uses closeups of hands, wallets, pockets and faces in a perfectly timed ballet of images that explain, like a documentary, how pickpockets work. How one distracts, the second takes the wallet and quickly passes it to the third, who moves away. The primary rule: The man who takes the money never holds it. The three men work the train back and forth, at one point even smoothly returning a victim's empty wallet to his pocket. Their work has the timing, grace and precision of a ballet. They work as one person, with one mind. And there is a kind of exhibitionism in the way they show their moves to the camera but hide them from their victims.

Bresson films with a certain gravity, a directness. He wants his actors to emote as little as possible. He likes to film them straight on, so that we are looking at them as they look at his camera. Oblique shots and over-the-shoulder shots would place characters in the middle of the action; head-on shots say, “Here is a man and here is his situation; what are we to think of him?”

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Pickpocket (1959)

Rated NR adult themes

Martin Lassalle as Michel

Marika Green as Jeanne

Pierre Leymarie as Jacques

Jean Pelegri as Inspector

Kassagi as Thief

Dolly Scal as Michel's mother

Written and directed by

• Robert Bresson

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Pickpocket review – existential thrills in Robert Bresson’s study of a thief’s progress

Bresson’s 1959 film about a misfit who dreams of rising above conventional morals is a brilliant example of the cinema of ideas

R obert Bresson’s hypnotically intense and lucid movie-novella from 1959 is now revived as part of a director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and whatever creakiness I thought I saw in this masterly film for its last UK re-release has vanished. The andante pace of Pickpocket is part of its brilliance, part of its seriousness and its status as a cinema of ideas: a movie with something of Dostoevsky or Camus, or even Victor Hugo.

The then non-professional actor Martin LaSalle was cast by Bresson as Michel, a gloomy young man who spends his days writing his journal in a seedy bedsit: a precursor for the prison cell for which he is destined. (Michel is clearly an ancestor of Paul Schrader’s insomniac malcontents, but with his own monkish austerity.) Michel is plagued with nameless guilt about his elderly, unwell mother whom he cannot bring himself to visit, despite being urged by her young neighbour, Jeanne (Marika Green). His pal Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) tries to set him up with respectable paying jobs, but Michel has become obsessed with the occult thrill of pickpocketing: he broods over a biography of the 18th-century Irish pickpocket-adventurer George Barrington , and meets up with a pickpocketing gang who school him in the sticky-fingered art of unbuckling watches and pinching wallets. They also teach him how to pass the loot from man to man so no one, if spotted, will be found with the goods on him – even temporarily dropping the item into the pocket of another passerby if the heat is on, and then surreptitiously reclaiming it.

But Michel can’t help befriending a cop (Jean Pélégri) and regaling him with his theory of the thief as superman or existentialist hero, the criminal who does not deserve normal punishment. Bresson hired a real pickpocket, Henri Kassagi, to teach the tricks to his cast and play one of the thieves: after the movie Kassagi became a stage conjuror, as he was now too well known to go back to his old trade. Watching Pickpocket again, I saw how Michel in many ways resembles a novitiate priest: troubled, stern, haunted by questions of sin and guilt, as a priest gains access to people’s souls, the thief wants intimate access to their money. And of course, Michel is very like an addicted gambler – Dostoevsky again – and he is gambling his liberty and perhaps his immortal soul. Who could go back to working for a living after the fierce existential thrill of stealing from someone? After the intimate ecstasy, the almost sensual caress of the fingers inside the stranger’s pocket at the bar, the Métro, the racetrack? Is that why Michel is doing it? Or is stealing from strangers his idea of redemption after the unspeakable shame of stealing from his own mother? Or is he in denial about something that the cop can see: his banality, his inadequacy, all concealed by this tragicomic nonsense about being a criminal “superman”? The balletic stealth of Pickpocket is still compelling.

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Pickpocket is an intricately staged, truly intimate character study from the imitable Robert Bresson instantly solidifying itself as one of his greatest works. As was his practice, Bresson took Martin LaSalle , a non-actor to be his leading protagonist and puts a magnifying glass to his every movement.

The Uruguayan-French actor sports gaunt, rather severe features, thick eyebrows, a sauntering gait and a slumped posture. However, there’s also some facial similarity to Henry Fonda there, except LaSalle is even more “normal” if you can go so far. He seems altogether un-extraordinary and still, Bresson manages to tell an engaging story with such an unassuming star–not through emotions but the inverse–a complete lack of emotions replaced instead by actions stripped down to their purest elements.

Aside from being a vagrant who lives in a dilapidated flat, Michel is a perennial cynic who holds a bit of a superman complex. In fact, he’s not far off from Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment . The difference being Michel’s crimes are more mundane and as such the outcomes are far less pronounced. Still, after receiving recompense for his deeds, he too achieves a kind of redemption. That’s of vital importance in understanding both stories.

A Life of Blue Collar Crime

With such a life as he leads -not working, with few friends and little to do aside from betting on the horses – Michel fills his idle hours learning what it is to be a pickpocket. He immerses himself in the pursuit, so much so that it soon becomes his livelihood as he joins forces with a couple accomplices, still honing his trade, and gleaning inspiration from the life of pickpocket socialite extraordinaire George Barrington .

Except Michel seems nothing like this man. He’s no adventurer with a colorful personality. He watches the world with passionless eyes, lacking true purpose. He hardly talks to anyone, and when he does, it’s generally brusque in nature. He’s not looking to make friends aside from his “buddy” Jacques ( Pierre Leymarie ). He hardly even visits his sickly mother even when she’s lying on her deathbed. The only thing he does any with ambition is stealing.

But that’s what makes his neighbor Jeanne ( Marika Green ) all the more fascinating because she brings something out of him. It just takes him a long time to realize it. I cannot get it out of my head that Marika Green shares some striking resemblance to Natalie Portman . This notion shot into my head the first time I ever viewed Pickpocket . It serves no real obvious purpose but to suggest her beauty and maybe even that there’s a modernness to her or better yet a timelessness behind her eyes that’s full of some sort of inexplicable power. Maybe  Natalie Portman has that same quality as well. I will leave that for others to decide.

It’s striking that many of the scenes in Pickpocket are nearly silent, lacking scoring and often even dialogue, and yet they’re choreographed like the most elaborate dance in a musical. Instead of feet, though, hands are involved; the dexterous hands and limber fingers of pickpockets. Michel’s eyes rove as much as his prying fingers. It becomes a wonderfully exquisite orchestration of motions combined and layered on top of one another.

The arresting quality is not so much what the men pull off as this is fiction but the way in which Bresson delivers it to his audience. Once again it’s a deep understanding of the innumerable beautiful complexities of human movement. In this case, what results is a blue-collar crime ballet of forms.

There are also similarities here with Sam Fuller’s Pickup on Southstreet (1953) except in this case the life of a pickpocket is the extent of his existence. There are no gangsters, hidden plots, or big implications pointing to Cold Wars and Communists. But if they share anything it’s their equally impressive understanding of economical filmmaking with the innate ability to tell rich, impactful stories in a highly condensed amount of time.

Michel’s life is pitifully mundane in a sense and yet within that context, he’s still able to find hope and that’s the beauty of what Bresson suggests here through the simple functions of sound and image. He evokes a great deal from those very spare building blocks.

Resurrection of “Lazarus”

Thus, it was not the final words of Pickpocket that struck me (ie. Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a path I had to take ) but rather the image that we are left with. There stands Michel incarcerated in prison. It seemed inevitable. Because supermen do not exist, at least not in the way that he supposed. And yet in the same breath, when he shed that philosophy he found something better.

He caresses Jeanne through the bars, kisses her face. Yes, he’s still trapped, stuck in such a horrible spot without his freedom. And yet, the utter irony of it all is that in this one moment, before a very abrupt conclusion, Michel is finally free; finally saved by the graces of love and it took a prison cell to teach him as much.

His life was propelled by inaction highlighted by contained moments of theft and deception. Therefore, it’s in this final instance that Michel begins to exhibit some amount of goodness and affection bursting forth. His life no longer seems to be defined by being a pickpocket. For once, it’s defined by something else – by someone else.

Whereas Raskolnikov realized that he needed Sonya to resurrect him much like the Christ resurrected Lazarus, Michel comes to a similar conclusion here though he only believed in God for three minutes. Still, in a sense, he has been redeemed and now there’s a certain amount of hope in his life going forward. The straight and narrow is a tough road to traverse but Michel might find it yet.

What other comparisons can be drawn up between Bresson’s film and Crime & Punishment? How are they able to succeed differently utilizing the artistic forms of film and literature respectively. 

Pickpocket was originally released on December 16th, 1959 in the France. It can be streamed on Amazon or purchased from The Criterion Collection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knaJd298xE0

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Michel passes the time by picking pockets, careful to never be caught despite being watched by the police. His friend Jacques may suspect, while both men may have their eyes on Jeanne, the p... Read all Michel passes the time by picking pockets, careful to never be caught despite being watched by the police. His friend Jacques may suspect, while both men may have their eyes on Jeanne, the pretty neighbor of Michel's ailing mother. Michel passes the time by picking pockets, careful to never be caught despite being watched by the police. His friend Jacques may suspect, while both men may have their eyes on Jeanne, the pretty neighbor of Michel's ailing mother.

• Robert Bresson
• Martin LaSalle
• Marika Green
• Jean Pélégri
• 83 User reviews
• 121 Critic reviews
• 3 nominations

• (as Martin La Salle)
• L'inspecteur principal
• 1er complice

• 2ème complice
• Un inspecteur
• (uncredited)

• Un passager du métro
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• Trivia Banned in Finland until 1965 because of its depiction of authentic pickpocketing techniques.

[last lines]

Michel : Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.

• Connections Edited into Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une histoire seule (1989)
• Soundtracks Suite de symphonies d'Amadis (selection) (title uncredited) Music by Jean-Baptiste Lully (as J.B. Lulli) Transcription: Fernand Oubradous (as F. Oubradous) Conducted by Marc Lanjean Éditions Transatlantiques

User reviews 83

• May 5, 2002
• How long is Pickpocket? Powered by Alexa
• December 16, 1959 (France)
• Gare de Lyon, Paris, France
• Compagnie Cinématographique de France
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• Runtime 1 hour 16 minutes
• Black and White

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Pickpocket Reviews

The style of the film is characteristic of the director... But this time the method defeats itself. In rejecting every irrelevant action, in ruthlessly refining away every decoration, Bresson has thrown away the motives as well.

Full Review | Aug 10, 2022

A wonderfully flowing character study which treads the border between sanity and lunacy.

Full Review | Jul 7, 2022

It's both seriously tense and infused with intense yearning.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2022

A short and flawless wonder.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 3, 2022

Hypnotically intense and lucid...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2022

Robert Bressons existential character study meticulously examines a pickpocket whose criminality is its own punishment.

Full Review | May 1, 2022

[Robert] Bresson always choses the most realistic settings and situations. He makes a great use of two of film's most credible devices: the narration and the printed word.

Full Review | Jan 23, 2020

At first one may be impressed by the mystery surrounding these characters, until one realises that they are only mysterious because they are unable to create their own destinies.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2020

Pickpocket is a film that puts the characters directly into a frame of judgment and asks the viewer if they would really try to understand the character's side of the story.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 25, 2019

Bresson always tells his story obliquely, so he never lets narrative suspense build, or emotional intensity be foregrounded... In short, a masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 25, 2019

The movie, above all, affirms the miracle of redemptive love and its price in humility and unconditional surrender.

Full Review | Mar 4, 2019

Pickpocket is an intricately staged, truly intimate character study from the imitable Robert Bresson instantly solidifying itself as one of his greatest works.

Full Review | Jun 1, 2017

... it's the strange quality of non-actor Martin LaSalle that sets the film apart. Is he as dead inside as he appears to the outside world? His criminal existence alienates him from the people he cares about even as he continues to pursue it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 6, 2014

This mysterious film composed of silence and emptiness accumulates extraordinary power, and unleashes it in a profoundly moving moment.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 3, 2014

Pragmatic to the point of being almost mechanical, Pickpocket it is paradoxically saturated with soulfulness.

Full Review | Original Score: 88/100 | Mar 21, 2013

A picture so original in style that it sometimes seems downright peculiar.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2013

A marvel of poise and circumspect emotion from French auteur Robert Bresson.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 5, 2013

It is, at base, about self-fulfilment and redemption through love -- a common enough idea in films. But this 1959 epic has seldom been equalled as a philosophical treatise on the subject.

Even more than the deadpan anti-thesping, it's the virtuoso thievery sequences (movement, disguise, distraction) that really mesmerise.

Robert Bresson made this short electrifying study in 1959; it's one of his greatest and purest films, full of hushed transgression and sudden grace.

Pickpocket (1959) Directed by Robert Bresson

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Pickpocket (1959) review — a faultless, thrilling tale of a petty French thief

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★★★★ “This film is not a thriller.” That opening line of the pre-title crawl from this Robert Bresson masterpiece is inherently misleading. Almost everything is fundamentally thrilling in this propulsive tale of a petty criminal, Michel (Martin LaSalle), who becomes an obsessive and prodigious pickpocket, all in the name of existential despair — so French!

“The world is already upside down,” is the mantra he uses to justify his crimes. But just like Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver , whose writer Paul Schrader is a Pickpocket devotee, Michel is craving the kind of order, and justice, that he can only find behind bars.

Marika Green — the aunt of Eva Green from Casino Royale — represents the realm of normality, which remains tragically unavailable. A

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Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)

Robert Bresson described Pickpocket (1959), his fifth feature, as an “impatient film”. It took him only three months to outline a treatment, six weeks to cast and prepare, eleven to produce and twelve to edit. For an artist who made only thirteen features over the course of his forty-year career, it was, he said “very sudden, very fast”, it went off without a hitch. 1

As a finished product, it appears as almost paradigmatically Bressonian: a taut statement of his singular and economic style identifiable by its syntax of faces, hands, isolated objects and empty spaces, shot starkly with a 50 mm lens and cut to a rhythmic soundtrack of mostly diegetic sounds. The film’s story is borrowed from Crime and Punishment — it’s about a man who commits forbidden acts, gets caught and goes to a prison, where his suffering is ameliorated by the love of a steadfast woman — but Pickpocket suppresses much of Dostoevsky’s plot in favour of a distinctly cinematic language. In making his protagonist a petty thief rather than an axe-wielding murderer, Bresson’s film focused on the mechanics of pickpocketing. In this respect, it’s a companion piece to A Man Escaped (1956), which directly preceded Pickpocket and is also a film about hands at work. In the earlier film, hands are shown constructing the tools for the hero’s suspenseful liberation from a Gestapo prison. In the latter, Bresson captures Michel’s (played by Uruguayan non-actor Martin LaSalle) dexterous deeds as they learn and ultimately master the art of pickpocketing. In A Man Escaped , the convict’s handiwork delivers him from prison; in Pickpocket , it paves the path toward Michel’s incarceration.

Bresson’s depiction of pickpocketing is almost documentary in style, but for all its tactility, it is Michel’s interior struggle that lies at the heart of the film. Though less explicitly religious than Diary of a Country Priest or The Trial of Joan of Arc , Pickpocket is equally a film concerned with what Bresson referred to as the human soul, both in its captivity and, as each of his films dramatize, its transformation. What motivates Michel’s last-moment swerve toward Jeanne (Marika Green) in Pickpocket ’s final scene remains mysterious, but nonetheless intense for this. Economy and suppression—watchwords of Bresson’s style—are key. A single line of narrative combined with a reprise of Lully and the image of Jeanne kissing Michel’s culpable hands are enough to signal his spiritual liberation, even as LaSalle’s performance remains affectless, stripped of all expressivity. The scene is the counterpart to Michel’s earlier transformation in which he is wordlessly, disinterestedly, taken in hand by the professional Kassagi and initiated into the real art of what he had hitherto only practiced desultorily. The scene is all but silent, and it is only the repetition of gestures, dissected into a montage of hands, looks and objects, that marks Michel’s arrival as true pickpocket.

This mingling of the spiritual and the material is a key element of Bresson’s formalism, but throughout Bresson’s thirteen feature films, a similar tendency toward contradiction is at work. For all his emphasis on precision and control, chance is a key element of Bresson’s work. In Pickpocket , shot lists were meticulously planned, especially for the complex outdoor scenes, but when it came to filming, which Bresson deliberately scheduled for the July vacation, they were rarely consulted, let alone followed. 2 Anachronisms, too, abound in Bresson. Only two films — The Trial of Joan of Arc and Lancelot du Lac — are actually set in the Middle Ages, but something like a medieval setting is often conjured by the cinematography, which makes the banks of the Seine appear like a moat, or a Gestapo prison like an ancient dungeon. Pickpocket was the first of Bresson’s film to embrace the streets, cafes and metros of Paris as a location for his films (as Truffaut and Godard did in the same year), but alongside the pinball machines and fun fare rides, blasts of Lully’s Baroque music interrupt the scene, and Michel’s garret, bare of even running water, seems to belong to the nineteenth-century rather than Pickpocket ’s post-war, consumption-driven modernity.

On closer inspection, the alliance of opposites is everywhere in Pickpocket . Far from the received idea of Bresson as an ascetic, locked up in with his bare essentials and Pascalian maxims, Pickpocket is a deeply sensuous film. With his Egon Schiele-like angularity, Michel is beauteous, luminescent when in the throes of a trick, his eyes bulging as his hands covertly dip into the cavity of a woman’s purse or brush up against an accomplice at the racetrack. There’s a sumptuousness, too, to the sequence at the film’s heart: a four-and-a-half-minute ballet of the sleight-of-hand, shot on site at the Gare de Lyon, in which we see three pickpockets work both the station and the train with mesmerizing fluidity, a dance heightened by the percussive soundtrack of heels on the station floor, the sliding of train doors back and forth. The evidence of Bresson’s pleasure in constructing these sublime sequences, which hark back to an era of silent cinema, dispels any simplistic reading of him as a sober moralist. In interviews, he delighted in conveying details from his own research: “When there is a group of three, four or five very skilled pickpockets—international ones—at a gathering like Longchamp, something remarkable happens. I mean: something happens in the air as much as to the wallets.” 3

Pickpocketing itself bespeaks a kind of contradiction, a refusal of the received order of private property and its tactile perversion. Money, wherever it exists in Bresson’s work, is always a token of its falsity, and along with exchange, account keeping, commerce, pawn brokering and counterfeiting, it becomes increasingly prevalent in the films, a development that coincides with Bresson’s own darkening worldview. In L’argent (1983), Bresson’s final film, made in his eighties, money’s omnipresence coincides with a despairing condemnation of contemporary society and its ills. In Pickpocket , by contrast, money is still charged with a capacity to lead to its opposite. It is another one of Bresson’s paradoxes that with Michel’s imprisonment, a pathway toward freedom emerges. When Jeanne kisses his culpable hands in the final scene, it is a beatific act of redemption. Pickpocket is one of Bresson’s purest statements and impassioned defences of form but at the same time, it’s in its proliferations of opposites, in its refusal of dogmatism, that Pickpocket ’s emotional intensity operates. It’s a heterogeneity that ultimately reveals the otherwise hidden connections between man and the world for Bresson, and allows him to move across the boundaries of the visible and the invisible, the tactile and the hidden, the modern and the antiquated. Such revelations require formal commitment to irreverence, to mischief and to magic.

Pickpocket (1959, France)

Prod Co: Compagnie Cinématographique de France Prod: Agnès Delahaie Dir: Robert Bresson Scr: Robert Bresson Phot: Léonce-Henri Burel Ed: Raymond Lamy

Cast: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri

• Robert Bresson, Bresson on Bresson , Interviews 1943–1983, NYRB Books, New York, 2016, p. 63. ↩
• Bresson on Bresson , p. 257. ↩
• Bresson on Bresson , p. 76. ↩

Pickpocket (1959)

Alfred Hitchcock’s remarkably Bressonian The Wrong Man opens with an unusual directorial prologue warning the viewer not to expect a typical Hitchcockian “suspense picture.” Three years later, Bresson prefaced his own Pickpocket with a similar caveat, alerting the viewer in an opening crawl that “This film is not a thriller.” Yet where Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man was clearly a departure for the director, Bresson’s Pickpocket is anything but a Hitchcockian departure for Bresson.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/spiritual value, age appropriateness, mpaa rating, caveat spectator.

The opening shot, with Michel (Martin La Salle, whose much-noted resemblance to The Wrong Man ’s Henry Fonda may have been a factor in his casting) simultaneously writing and narrating his story (or confession), overtly recalls the director’s first distinctively Bressonian masterpiece, Diary of a Country Priest .

Structurally, Pickpocket ’s story of a guilty man spending nearly the whole film evading the consequences of his actions is an almost perfect mirror image of the innocent prisoner’s escape efforts in A Man Escaped (there is even an early abortive brush with the law mirroring the early abortive escape attempt in the previous film). The enigmatic climax, while more challenging than Bresson’s previous films, anticipates the later, increasingly difficult Bresson of Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette .

In some respects Pickpocket is a mirror image of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man . In The Wrong Man , Henry Fonda’s a hard-working musician is an everyman, an anybody. By contrast, Pickpocket ’s Michel, a bland, lazy intellectual, is an atypical thief, for he tells us in the first lines that those who do such things don’t tell about them, yet he has done them and is telling us.

Yet he’s not as unusual as he affects to be, judging from the sophistries he exchanges with a police inspector (Jean Pelegri) about “supermen” of such genius and value to society that they are above ordinary rules, and can commit crimes rather than “stagnate.” Uneasily aware of the shabbiness of his position, he adds half-heartedly, “Don’t worry, it would only be at first. Then they’d stop.” The inspector, though, knows better: Michel can’t stop, until something stops him.

There’s something else Michel can’t do: make contact with other people. Unlike Fonda’s Wrong Man character, a decent family man whose life and relationships are thrown into upheaval when he is wrongly suspected of a crime, Michel is an isolated loner who holds himself at arm’s length from other people, avoiding contact with others until his life of crime results in someone else making contact with him.

At least twice in the film Michel fails to recognize people he has met before, a symptom, perhaps, of his inability to engage other people. “You’re not in the real world,” Jeanne (Marika Green), a young neighbor of Michel’s mother, tells him. “You share no interests with others.” Even the experienced thief (sleight-of-hand artist Kassagi) who becomes a mentor to Michel never gets to know him, nor vice versa.

Does Michel want to be caught? Does he taunt the inspector because he feels untouchable, or is there another reason? As always, Bresson examines actions but offers little attention to motives, an approach that here seems to suggest that Michel’s choices may be a mystery even to himself, his threadbare theorizing only rationalization.

What can be said is that lurking behind Michel’s theories of supermen above the rules is resistance to the idea of higher rules, a higher judgment. “Judged how? According to laws? It’s absurd,” he scoffs. To this Jeanne asks, like Marie in Balthazar , “Do you believe in nothing?” Michel answers, “I believed in God, Jeanne, for three minutes.” Significantly, the occasion of Michel’s three-minute encounter with God is a funeral.

Even more than A Man Escaped , Pickpocket offers an ideal case for Bresson’s insistence on naked actions devoid of acting, since Michel’s occupation requires him to suppress any sign of emotion. Yet in a profound sense this is irrelevant; Bresson would bring the same stylistic rigor to any subject (cf. the lovers’ quarrels of Lancelot of the Lake ), and I don’t suppose he particularly sought out topics that lent themselves to impassive acting. His purpose was not verisimilitude, but a particular effect.

Redemption, as usual in Bresson, is enigmatic but evocative. What changes for Michel at that critical moment when another hand decisively meets his? Certainly, his pretended superman status has been shaken; yet he hardly seems contrite. Why does he now respond differently to Jeanne? Perhaps his solipsistic isolation has been breached by an unexpected encounter with the force of another will and a personality outside himself? What does it mean? Bresson asks but never tells.

Product Notes

Long out of print on VHS, Pickpocket is at last available on DVD from the Criterion Collection, which already includes Diary of a Country Priest , Au Hasard Balthazar and others. The disc comes with numerous extras including an audio commentary, an interview with Bresson, a 2003 documentary, and footage of Kassagi on French television.

However, the Criterion edition has also sparked controversy by including a liner-notes essay by novelist Gary Indiana, who brings an anti-religious, at times ludicrously coarse interpretive framework to Bresson. NY Press film critic Armond White launched a blistering critique of Indiana’s approach, and the erudite Bressonians at Masters of Cinema have weighed in in favor of White and against Indiana (cf. this fluid page ; no permalink available).

Criterion’s contribution to the accessibility of Bresson’s work in the US is greatly appreciated. It’s a shame their Pickpocket release provided a platform for Indiana’s agenda-driven Freudian reductionism.

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Pickpocket (1959) – Film Review

Director: Robert Bresson Cast: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri Certificate: PG

By Sarah Margan

Where would cinema be without Robert Bresson?

It would undoubtedly be a far less interesting place. He was a huge influence on the auteurs of the French New Wave, and has also inspired the likes of Michael Haneke, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jim Jarmusch, Monte Hellman, Abel Ferrara and Paul Schrader; the latter pops up in the special features of this Blu-ray release to discuss his admiration for the film and its director.

“Desire to make a fast buck”

In Pickpocket , the central character is Michel, who isn’t capable of holding down a job – he doesn’t appear to want to either. Instead, he hones his skills as a thief, joining forces with a gang that regularly pulls off intricate thefts at a railway station, taking money and personal items while moving through an unsuspecting crowd.

You do, however, wonder at times, how the heists are carried out without anybody noticing, and there are some handy hints for anyone looking to follow Michel’s example!

As the police begin to suspect his involvement in crime, Michel leaves the country, spending several years abroad. On his return, he’s reunited with Jeanne, a young woman who was his deceased mother’s neighbour. She’s since had a baby with his only friend, Jacques, but after refusing to marry him, is now alone.

Michel finally gets a job so he can support both her and the child, but eventually, the desire to make a fast buck by stealing becomes too strong, leading to his downfall and a personal realisation that looks set to haunt him.

“Exquisite”

Is Pickpocket Bresson’s masterpiece, as so many critics and film lovers have stated over the years? It’s hard to argue against their assessment. Although very brief – the running time is just 75 minutes – it’s a gripping character study that never wastes a second. Bresson’s use of the camera is exquisite too, shooting largely on the hoof among real crowds, giving certain scenes a sense of urgency.

The leading man, Martin La Salle, was an amateur actor at the time, and he brings a fresh yet intense quality to the role. Marika Green, then aged just 16 (and, incidentally, the real-life aunt of Eva Green), is impressive as Jeanne, the one person who may be able to make Michel see the error of his ways.

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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.

Martin LaSalle Marika Green Jean Pélégri Dolly Scal Pierre Leymarie Pierre Étaix Kassagi César Gattegno Sophie Saint-Just Dominique Zardi

Director Director

Robert Bresson

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Michel Clément Claude Clément Jacques Ballanche

Producer Producer

Agnès Delahaie

Writer Writer

Editor editor.

Raymond Lamy

Cinematography Cinematography

Léonce-Henri Burel

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Henri Raichi

Production Design Production Design

Pierre Charbonnier

Sound Sound

Antoine Archimbaud

Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France

Releases by Date

Theatrical limited, 03 jun 2022, 16 dec 1959, 09 dec 1960, 20 may 1963, 01 dec 1967, 10 jun 2010, releases by country, netherlands.

• Physical 6 DVD

South Korea

• Theatrical limited PG Re-Release
• Theatrical NR

75 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★ 1

If this guy tried to pickpocket me I'd kick his ass

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 3

Obviously far from the first to say this but I adore the way the pickpocket setpieces are sequenced. It's formally romantic, treated as a supple craft, an artform like any other that requires skill and practice and the orchestration of simple, beautiful motions of hands and objects. It's a complicated contrast to the film's broader view which is one of a wandering, fatalistic weariness that comes with the knowledge that the only thing you're good at (the thing you are impulsively compelled to do even in the face of certain moral doom) is destined to alienate you from civilized society and eventually entrap you in isolation. The shot of his hand grabbing the cash vs. the rival hand appearing in the frame with the handcuffs all in one shot... [Chef kiss.]

Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

A boy cinephile becomes a man when he learns to love the uncharismatic doofus protagonist of this movie.

Review by Wes ★★★★½ 3

i liked it when every human being shown on screen sounded like they were walking in a resident evil game

Review by Rod Sedgwick ★★★★½ 9

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

So after the overwhelming satisfaction I found with Bresson's A Man Escaped , I immediately dove into his next chronological work Pickpocket . With a brisk 75 minute running time and an intriguing premise, I expected to have the same response that I had with his previous work. Whilst I didn't have the immediate affection for this film as I had for A Man Escaped , I have wrestled with it more after the fact to the point that it is showing its true colours and I am very eager to watch it again.

With Bresson, one must adjust the way they read and understand film, and it helps to recognise his techniques. He throws convention out the window and strips away what…

Review by Dante ★★★★★ 5

great movie. what if somebody made it about a male prostitute or a drug dealer or a guy who played cards and did war crimes.

Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 5

what if dostoyevsky actually liked the characters that he wrote? i imagine it would look a lot like this.

i must state the truth: if a guy devotes his life to becoming the best pickpocket there is, he becomes a total expert with his hands, a deft cutpurse and sneak-thief, i'm sorry, but you gotta let him do it, if he's good enough to take your wallet or purse, just let it happen, you gotta respect the man's craft, his devotion to his profession, abolish the jails, let the pickpockets go, they must be free to practice and perfect their art!!!

Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★★½ 21

You Have 90 Minutes To Comply: The New Year Project

Well I must say it's very nice of Pickpocket to start off by telling us it's not a thriller.

I'm slightly pissed off by that opening. It could be because I'm over-tired and annoyed and possibly being over-sensitive, but there's a slightly sneery tone behind it that almost smacks to me as suggesting that it would be beneath this film to be labelled a mere thriller. It's a really odd and stand-offish way to start a film, I must admit, and while I suppose in one way I do slightly appreciate its honesty, I think it could have done me a big favour in furthering that honesty.

"This is a…

Review by Melissa Tamminga ★★★★ 5

A suit that's slightly too large. Impassive eyes that hold yours just past the point of comfort and suddenly drop. Delicately roving hands that slide over a cuff, a button, a purse clasp, and slip inward - or shy away.

I'm not sure when I've been more uncomfortable in the company of a protagonist. Watching him is like an experience of repeatedly, accidentally catching someone masturbating - and then we both walk away, pretending no one saw such a private compulsion made public.

In the final moments, the impassive eyes change; they are less secretive, hidden; there is, even, an open, innocent eagerness. My discomfort drops for the first time.

But then, "Fin." What has that last scene resolved? I am not sure.

Fascinating.

Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 5

Pickpocket is a film of a lost soul, of a man detached and cold to the world. He exists almost just for the thrill of his crimes, but the film leaves us as just observers to his excitement. This is a sincere and austere film, with no overt narrative tricks. Instead we contemplate and witness a lonely life, a life of someone who sits in a room and practices pickpocketing techniques. He is a man who stands in the middle of the world, but cares only for himself. He lives without fear of God, and the woman he loves cannot save him. This is a film about the pointlessness of the pickpocket and how they add nothing to society. To be nothing is quite an existence. Pickpocket is a small and intriguing film, one of great influence, notably on Paul Schrader, but even today it holds up as a classic.

My Top Films of the 1950s

Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★

Intricately orchestrated and immediately one of Robert Bresson’s most significant endeavours, Pickpocket was the first movie for which the French directed penned the original screenplay. It features Uruguayan non-actor Martin LaSalle, as a professional magician, communicating a unique quality which sets the film apart as he accomplishes sleight-of-hand tricks to take advantage of the people of Paris. Bresson stylises the scenes in a specific manner to demonstrate depth; where virtually every activity from LaSalle operates to illustrate an engaging message. There's a scarcity of sentimentality, substituted instead by stripped-down developments in their purest aspects, and it all results in an extremely satisfying and enjoyable experience.

Review by Meli🐢🌻🎧 ★★★★

Pickpocket (1959)  but Michel gets caught for saying  yoink like in The Simpsons every time he pickpockets

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• Blu-ray/DVD edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
• January 15 2015

See more details, packaging, or compare

This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsive pursuit of the thrill of stealing grows, however, so does his fear that his luck is about to run out. A cornerstone of the career of this most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, Pickpocket is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace, the work of a director at the height of his powers.

Picture 9/10

Extras 8/10

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Pickpocket (DVD)

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Release details.

• Duration: 76 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Robert Bresson
• Screenwriter: Robert Bresson
• Martin Lassalle
• Marika Green
• Pierre Leymarie
• Jean Pelegri
• Pierre Etaix

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Pickpocket Review

16 Dec 1959

Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, this was the second film in Robert Bresson's prison cycle' that also included A Man Escaped and The Trial of Joan of Arc. Originally entitled Incertitude and filmed on the streets of Paris at the same time as Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle, this typically spartan drama fell foul of contemporary critics, some of whom decried its lack of psychological realism, while others accused Bresson of succumbing to elliptical self-indulgence. Yet Louis Malle described it as a film of lightning newness' and it has since been acclaimed as one of Bresson's masterworks. Indeed, Paul Schrader was so influenced by its visual and dramatic rigour that he shaped the ending of American Gigolo in its image.

         Bresson again attained the austere authenticity that characterised all his pictures. He also insisted on precisely controlling the gestures and expressions of his non-professional performers and even reprised the voice-over tactic from  The Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped's unflinching fascination with manual dexterity. In order to reinforce the latter's documentary feel, Bresson hired a genuine dipper, Kassagi, to teach Martin Lassalle the tricks of the trade, which he filmed in tight close-up to emphasise the impression that Michel was acquiring something that would fill the void at the centre of his existence rather than any baser material need.

         But, for all the obvious criminality, this is very much a tale of redemption, in which Michel's transference of his obsession with theft to a love for Jeanne is couched in near-miraculous terms, with the constantly open door of Michel's apartment signifying the free will that led him astray and the locked cell in which he finds salvation representing predestined divine intervention.

            However, the film has also invited non-religious interpretations, with some seeing Michel's alliance with Jeanne as a deliverance from a repressed homosexuality that manifested itself in his fetishistic fixation with the techniques of pickpocketing, while others have identified an Oedipal bond between Michel and the mother whom he avoids for undisclosed reasons until she's on her death bed.

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Pickpockets, common sense media reviewers.

Aspiring teen thieves learn the trade; violence, cursing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

No real positive messages.

Teen characters steal wallets, change purses, and

A lead character shoots and kills another characte

Two teen characters shown having sex, no nudity.

Regular profanity: "f--k," "a--hole," "bulls--t,"

Marijuana and cigarette smoking, beer and alcohol

Parents need to know that Pickpockets is a 2018 drama in which three teens who pickpocket pedestrians on the streets of Bogotá learn from a master. As the title suggests, there are many scenes in which the lead characters steal wallets, change purses, and smartphones out of the pockets of unwitting victims…

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

Teen characters steal wallets, change purses, and smartphones from unwitting pedestrians. They are taken under the wing of a master pickpocket, who owes money to a corrupt police officer.

Violence & Scariness

A lead character shoots and kills another character. A lead character starts a fire in a building where cockfighting is taking place. To distract another pickpocket, a lead character fakes an epileptic seizure. As title suggests, characters are constantly robbing pedestrians, sometimes resorting to violence -- punching, kicking, tackling -- when victim catches them in the act and resists. Knife violence: As punishment for being unable to pay off a debt to a corrupt police officer, the police officer has the man's hand cut across the top.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

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Regular profanity: "f--k," "a--hole," "bulls--t," "goddammit," "son of a bitch," "f--got." Middle finger gesture.

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Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Marijuana and cigarette smoking, beer and alcohol drinking from adults and teens.

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Pickpockets is a 2018 drama in which three teens who pickpocket pedestrians on the streets of Bogotá learn from a master. As the title suggests, there are many scenes in which the lead characters steal wallets, change purses, and smartphones out of the pockets of unwitting victims. Sometimes these robberies turn violent when the victims catch the pickpockets in the act and try to fight back with punches and kicks. One character is shot and killed. One of the lead characters provides distraction for another pickpocket by pretending to have an epileptic seizure. A man who owes money to a corrupt police officer is punched, then cut across the hand with a knife; some blood. Lead characters start a fire in a building where cockfighting is taking place. There's regular profanity, including "f--k" and homophobic slurs, as well as marijuana and cigarette smoking and beer and alcohol consumption among teens and adults. One sex scene between teens is shown, with no nudity. In Spanish with English subtitles. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

Fresh and Doggy are part of a group of teen PICKPOCKETS on the streets of Bogotá. Their actions attract the attention of Chucho ( Carlos Bardem ), an expert pickpocket from Spain who cannot leave Colombia until he pays his debts to a corrupt police officer. Chucho instructs Fresh and Doggy in the best ways to pickpocket without having to resort to violence. Fresh and Doggy recruit their new friend Juana to join them as they go on a pickpocketing spree, stealing wallets, change purses, and smartphones. Chucho takes a cut of their "earnings" as payment for his training and also because he works "undercover" as a security guard, with access to all the security cameras posted on the streets he watches. As they start to get better and steal more valuables, Fresh, Doggy, and Juana attract the attention of their former pickpocket gang from the old neighborhood they used to work. Despite being told by everyone to stay out of that old neighborhood, Fresh, Doggy, and Juana go rogue and pickpocket wealthy attendees of the opera. This leads to calamitous consequences for all concerned, and after Doggy goes too far and is taken prisoner and Chucho disavows them for going it alone in a neighborhood outside of his jurisdiction, Fresh and Juana must use all of their newfound skills to pull off their most difficult heist yet, rescue Doggy, and make things right with Chucho.

Is It Any Good?

This movie somehow manages to pull back from the brink of all things noir cliché as the action barrels along to a riveting climax. At first, Pickpockets suggests it might be the usual pileup of post-Tarantino tropes -- glorified thieves, sardonically clever crime bosses, humor mined out of self-aware nihilism -- but as it progresses, the substance of the story takes over from the expected noir style. There's enough backstory to Chucho (the elder statesman of pickpockets) and Fresh (the leader of the three teen pickpockets under Chucho's tutelage) to make the action something more than the inherent thrill of stealing from unwitting pedestrians -- just enough to make the viewer root for them, warts and all.

And it's because none of the characters are very decent or kind or trustworthy that the ending is as unpredictable as an ending can be these days. Will everyone die? Will there be double-, triple-, quadruple-crosses until only one emerges victorious? Who will make it out of this relatively unscathed, and how? The second half of the movie is everything you would want from an action-driven noir movie, and while it's easy to think otherwise at the beginning, Pickpockets doesn't disappoint.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how crime was shown in Pickpockets . Did the movie glamorize picking pockets, or did it portray the act in a bad light?

How does this movie compare to others centered on criminals?

What do you see as the appeal of movies in which all of the characters make questionable life decisions?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : April 12, 2018
• Cast : Carlos Bardem , Natalia Reyes , Emiliana Pernia
• Director : Peter Webber
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 108 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

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How to outsmart pickpockets while on holiday (according to a professional pickpocket)

E very year, thousands of British holidaymakers are pickpocketed while on holiday – but there are ways to protect yourself, points out a professional pickpocket.

The issue of tourists being targeted by thieves resurfaced over the Easter weekend, when an Italian woman went viral for preventing a pickpocketing in Venice – and was then attacked for bringing attention to the crime.

According to a study carried out by the travel insurance comparison site Quotezone, Italy has the highest number of pickpocketing reports in online travel reviews (463 mentions for every one million reviews), with the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain and Pantheon in Rome among the hotspots. France came second in the study (283 per million) and the Netherlands came third (143 mentions per million).

Speaking to The Telegraph , professional theatrical pickpocket Lee Thompson – who is a member of the Magic Circle – explains the tricks of the trade, how to detect a pickpocket, and the easiest ways to protect your belongings abroad.

Who is a prime target for a pickpocket?

Pickpockets target high-profile individuals, according to Thompson, but he says that everyone is a potential victim. “Pickpockets target people who seem distracted, and they also target those who seem vulnerable,” he says. “They do this regardless of status.” Thompson adds that pickpockets typically “strike when attention wavers, or when someone leaves their valuables unguarded”. 

He also warns that wearing expensive jewellery can attract unwanted attention, so tourists should avoid wearing designer accessories that may make them a target. “Instead, opt for modest attire that doesn’t scream ‘tourist’. Avoid those designer shopping bags, too,” he advises.

Where do pickpockets operate?

Pickpockets primarily operate in busy tourist areas, like markets, and in crowded transit hubs, and may work alone or in groups. In the latter case, pickpocketing teams are adept at creating distractions. “This could be anything from a game to a loud shout, all designed to avert your attention while an unseen accomplice steals your valuables,” warns the Metropolitan Police. “So do try not to be easily distracted.”

Pickpockets also operate in shops, where people are more likely to be standing still, making them an easier target: “it’s easier for them to brush past people, take items and blend into the crowd,” the Met adds.

What are the common tricks used by pickpockets?

“Beware of friendly strangers,” says Thompson. “They may cause sudden commotions. These will divert your attention, so stay focused and assertive. This is especially important in crowded areas. That’s where pickpockets are most active.” 

The Metropolitan Police warns of so-called hugger muggers: “They know all the tricks and are extremely light-fingered, with most of their thefts only taking a second or two. One of their tactics is ‘hugger mugging’ where a thief will appear to be over-friendly for no particular reason and hug you while pickpocketing you.”

What items are vulnerable to theft?

Pickpockets thrive on access, according to Thompson. “Items like phones stick out from pockets, while bags left on chairs present an opportunity – wallets, phones, passports: no item is off limits. 

“Leave valuables in your hotel safe,” he adds. “Also leave non-essential items there. Carrying bulky gadgets and too much cash makes you more vulnerable. Minimise your load to essential items and keep them close at hand.”

Thompson suggests wearing a money belt, for extra protection, or a front-pocket wallet. “They are not the most fashionable accessories,” he notes, “but they offer a discreet and effective way to safeguard your cash and cards.”

What about digital pickpocketing?

In the digital age, pickpocketing has evolved beyond the realm of sleight of hand, points out Thompson. “Criminals use modern technology to steal personal information and funds remotely. Thieves can scan credit cards and passports from a distance, using devices like card skimmers and RFID [radio frequency identification] readers. They can do this without the victim even realising.” To guard against this, Thompson suggests purchasing an RFID wallet – which can block these signals – or special card sleeves which create a barrier against electronic scanning.

What should I do if I suspect I am being targeted?

“Maintaining vigilance is key,” says Thompson. “If you sense someone following you, change direction. Or go to a nearby building for safety. A pickpocket thrives on anonymity. They will likely lose interest if they suspect you’re onto them.”

What should you do if you are targeted?

Thompson recommends that tourists trust their instincts. “Seek refuge in a shop or crowded, well-lit area; report suspicious activity to authorities right away; and take proactive steps to safeguard belongings,” he says. 

He adds that you should always place your personal safety above the safeguarding of your belongings, and to try to defuse confrontations when possible. “Pickpockets generally aim to avoid confrontation,” he says, but warns that “things can escalate if they feel threatened”.

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‘Monkey Man’ pulls no punches in elaborate, entertaining fight scenes

Dev patel stars as a revenge-minded man scheming and jabbing his way through a chaotic, highly charged city in india..

“Monkey Man” director Dev Patel also stars as a driven young man called Kid who’s determined to infiltrate the city’s inner circle.

Universal Pictures

Dev Patel comes out swinging in the monumentally entertaining and bare-knuckled revenge flick “Monkey Man,” serving up a series of extended and elaborate fight sequences so bruising and hyper-violent they make the action in the “Road House” reboot seem like a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.

As director, co-writer, producer and star, Patel has created an homage to Asian martial arts movies and a modern political fable that is infused with Indian culture and folklore, with a core story that plays like “Death Wish” meets “Fight Club” meets Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” meets “John Wick.” (How's THAT for a meeting!) It’s a gorgeously photographed, kinetically paced, blood-spattered and visceral gut-punch of a movie.

Fifteen years after Patel’s starmaking turn in “Slumdog Millionaire” and continuing through such works as the “Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies, “Lion,” “The Personal History of David Copperfield” and “The Green Knight,” he delivers arguably the most powerful performance of his career playing a character known only as Kid. When we meet Kid, he’s wearing a gorilla mask and getting the stuffing beaten out of him in an underground fight club where the slimy ring impresario Tiger (a fantastically entertaining Sharlto Copley) amps up the crowd’s lust for violence and pays bonuses to Kid for actual blood spilled.

For reasons explained in flashbacks sprinkled throughout the film, Kid is determined to infiltrate the city’s wealthy, elite and corrupt inner circle. (“Monkey Man” was filmed in Mumbai and Indonesia and set in a fictional Indian city called Yatana, with director Patel and cinematographer Sharone Meir favoring quick-cut closeups and neon colors.)

Kid orchestrates an intricately choreographed pickpocket scam to take possession of a wallet belonging to Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), who runs the city’s most exclusive high-end nightclub, and once in her office he talks his way into a job. (The pickpocket sequence is nothing short of exhilarating.) Working his way up from dishwasher to waiter to associate of Queenie’s fixer, Alphonso (Pitobash), Kid becomes a close observer of the goings-on within the club. One regular is the police chief Rana (Sikandar Kher), a vile and powerful and utterly corrupt thug who also appears in those aforementioned flashbacks, and you can probably guess that Kid has a very particular and personal reason for wanting to take out Rana.

After a brutal fight with Rana in which Kid inflicts (and receives) much damage but fails to kill him, Kid has to go on the run and eventually finds safe harbor with a community of hijra, the "third gender" people of South Asia, who nurse him back to health, teach him some valuable lessons and help him work on his fighting skills.

Under the guidance of the temple priestess Alpha (Vipin Sharma), Kid matures into a more disciplined, more determined and more dangerous warrior of the streets. He’s coming for Queenie, he’s coming for Rana, and his quest for vengeance and justice might take him all the way to the lair of the iniquitous candidate for prime minster, one Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande is a memorably chilling performance). We’re also hoping Kid will find the opportunity to rescue the beautiful Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala), an escort working under the abusive Queenie.

As a storyteller, Patel does a remarkable job of weaving in commentary on modern-day political and social issues in India, while adhering to a framework based on the Hindu legend of Hanuman, the god of courage and strength and self-discipline and heroic initiative — and oh yes, peppering the film with badass action. There’s even time for some action-movie humor, as when Kid takes a running start and tries to crash through a window — but instead of the usual shower of broken glass accompanying a spectacular, slow-motion flight, let’s just say the window wins this battle.

On a few occasions, “Monkey Man” might be a little too self-indulgent for its own good. The flashback sequences featuring Kid’s mother (Adithi Kalkunte), while effectively rendered, seem almost sadistic in certain lingering depictions. A bit of judicious trimming might have better served this element of the story. On balance, however, this is a well-paced and smartly edited work, with exquisite production design and an immersive shooting style that brings the city to life in all its chaotic and sometimes dangerous energy.

We often talk about how some movies really should be seen in theaters. Comedies. Horror films. Superhero adventures. Historical epics from some of our best directors. Add to that category super-charged action movies on the level of “Monkey Man.” You’ll want to join the applause when Kid springs into action.