Made during Robert Bresson's especially creative period and suggested by 'Crime and Punishment', this morality tale of a man's fall from grace and salvation through love is, for this viewer at any rate, one of this director's most mesmerising works.
He again uses the first person narrative and although there is music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, it is the carefully recorded and orchestrated noises that supply the soundtrack. The visual economy is matched by the spare dialogue whilst regular cinematographer L. H. Burel provides suitably harsh natural lighting. The editing of the renowned pickpocketing sequence is superlative.
The linchpin is the casting of Richard LaSalle and Marika Green, two of Bresson's best acteurs-modeles. LaSalle has been trained by puppet master Bresson not to show any emotion and whose face resembles a tabula rasa whilst the main emphasis is on his hands, the tools of his trade. Marika Green is, quite simply, stunning, combining subdued sensuality with the look of a Renaissance Madonna. Both were to turn 'professional' but this remains their finest filmic hour. Their final scene, surely one of Cinema's most moving, inspired the ending of Paul Schrader's 'American Gigolo'.
Bresson has been called the most Christian of directors and indeed his greatest films, in one way or another, are about redemption. Of this film he said: "With theft I entered the back door into the kingdom of morality".
He again uses the first person narrative and although there is music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, it is the carefully recorded and orchestrated noises that supply the soundtrack. The visual economy is matched by the spare dialogue whilst regular cinematographer L. H. Burel provides suitably harsh natural lighting. The editing of the renowned pickpocketing sequence is superlative.
The linchpin is the casting of Richard LaSalle and Marika Green, two of Bresson's best acteurs-modeles. LaSalle has been trained by puppet master Bresson not to show any emotion and whose face resembles a tabula rasa whilst the main emphasis is on his hands, the tools of his trade. Marika Green is, quite simply, stunning, combining subdued sensuality with the look of a Renaissance Madonna. Both were to turn 'professional' but this remains their finest filmic hour. Their final scene, surely one of Cinema's most moving, inspired the ending of Paul Schrader's 'American Gigolo'.
Bresson has been called the most Christian of directors and indeed his greatest films, in one way or another, are about redemption. Of this film he said: "With theft I entered the back door into the kingdom of morality".