For Michel [of Pickpocket] life is like a spy's journey into an alien land. Though every moment is dangerous, the real test of courage is to confront the menace of strangers on the packed trains of the metro. This is the most important part of his day: a weird relationship is set up with the stranger, weird partly because the stranger knows nothing about it and partly because the robbery is not primarily for financial gain (Michel admits his takings aren't often worth the risk) but for erotic satisfaction. Money to Michel is a symbol of sexual rather than economic power; only by rendering the stranger impotent is Michel's anxiety for a moment allayed. The pickpocket can only live as long as he is destroying the anonymous, affluent society about him. (p. 193)

It is in these documentary moments of Pickpocket … that Bresson shows his mastery as a director. A neurotic world is created without trick photography: menace and boredom are developed partly by the use of the same stations, trains, buses, and even the same extras in different crowds, partly by [L.H.] Burel's subtle camera-work, and partly by Bresson's sense of timing. Bresson suggests, he never states: and this he manages mostly by his cutting. His talent for building shots into sequences, and sequences into a whole film is an exceptional one: in its delicacy and elliptical gravity one feels that Bresson, like Eisenstein, has gone back to a study of Japanese poetry and drama. Yet a fine sensibility alone doesn't make a work of art. The ability to interpret intelligently is required, the ability to make the necessary connections; and this we do not find in Pickpocket.

Take for instance the character of Michel. What in fact is the weakness which drives him to "an adventure in theft for which he was not made"? Recent sociological and psycho-analytic knowledge should give us some idea, but Bresson seems indifferent to these findings. (Disturbing overtones in the film suggest he isn't conscious of them at all.) Michel himself is clear only on one point: he isn't a pickpocket for financial gain. Otherwise he is hopelessly confused…. Bresson is not interested in the nature of imprisonment: he is only interested in the desire to escape—and this he takes great pains to illustrate. (pp. 193-94)

Yet what is Michel trying to flee from—his neurosis, his selfhood, the human condition? In Un Condamné à Mort s'est Echappé (an earlier Bresson with many parallels to Pickpocket) a similar theme was treated realistically; enough anyway for it to make sense on a literal level—it was surely clear enough why its protagonist wished to escape from the Gestapo. In Pickpocket, however, the far from realistic action compels us to try to work out the nature of the escape.

This would be possible if there were some conflict. Unfortunately, all the characters (including the strangers on the metro) have the same sensitive, histrionic outlook on life as Michel. There is only one noticeable distinction: between the guilty who learn to love (the poor in spirit who shall inherit the earth) and those who lack this kind of understanding…. The characters in fact are shaped to illustrate Michel's (or Bresson's) sensibility, rather than to criticise it; so that the film gives us a picture of a curiously insulated world, on the surface soft and gentle, but beneath inexorably schematic. Its deficiencies are revealing: because there is no difference in planes of awareness, there is no humour; no one takes up a liberal position; and, most disturbingly of all, no one is aware of his motives.

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. None of them in fact is free. They remain puppets manipulated by their creator, forced to move along "the strange paths of love"; and the word "paths" in this context signifies tracks already worn and determined. The undergrowths of choice and possibility on either side are ignored. One is tempted to adapt to this film Sartre's words on Mauriac: "M. Bresson has put himself first. He has chosen divine omniscience and omnipotence. But films are made by men and for men. In the eyes of God, Who cuts through appearances and goes beyond them, there is no film, no art, for art thrives on appearances. God is not an artist. Neither is M. Bresson." (p. 194)