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...