Bresson is a master of concentration, psychological as well as physical…. Prison is the perfect setting for such a director: an intense narrow life with its minute everyday happenings magnified into high drama, the appearance of everything charged with meaning, and the soul—as almost nowhere else—a slide on a microscope. But in the outside world, where others live and other happenings impinge on the central one, this narrow preoccupation becomes too trim, cold and tidy. Bresson, at the expense of life and even of accuracy, sticks to the point: the point [of Pickpocket] being pickpocketing, or the mentality of a thief….

[Unfortunately,] life isn't like that: or so it struck me, watching this chill analysis of a corner of human aberration. The thief is a young intellectual with superman notions of morality, the deadpan expression of contemporary French film heroes, and a Dostoievskian relationship with a chief of police who has him firmly hooked and occasionally gives the line a twitch, just (it would appear) for fun…. The dialogue is chill and tidy too: even in moments of the greatest stress (death, decision, the acknowledgement of love) it sounds like words learnt by rote, which goes with the dream-like quality of everyone's movements, the air of compulsion to act as they do…. [Michel is] a literary crook, direct descendant of Raskolnikov, and all he does has the same one-track, joyless and self-conscious determination to be … well, consistent seems the main thing.

Bresson's technique is roughly documentary, down to that very stiltedness of dialogue and movement, and the film's most interesting moments are, not surprisingly, those in which we see something new in action: the technical detail of thieving, though surely it can't be as easy as all that…. When three conspirators go out on a pinching spree, there's an almost balletic movement of frisking, swapping and disposing of the remains…. This kind of thing is fascinating to watch, and basically cinematic; it couldn't be shown in any other medium, and even its exaggerations of speed and slickness are cinematic. But it all has to do with things—with objects and actions at special, isolated moments, divorced from everything else, 'set pieces.' But life (here I go again) is not a set piece, and to aim for naturalism in so artificial a framework defeats itself. (p. 406)