This movie is fucking bullshit. It’s a story of a young man who takes up pickpocketing, because (he tells us, tediously and uninterestingly) he views himself, for no evident reason, as a superman to whom conventional morality doesn’t apply, and thinks he ought to be able to take money from lesser people. So we know he started reading Crime and Punishment, but maybe didn’t get to the end before flaking out. He honestly doesn’t seem like the sort of person who’s ever finished reading a book, such a worthless nothing is he.

The rest of the movie is him pickpocketing, bragging to cops about it in a veiled way, almost getting caught, fleeing the city to pickpocket elsewhere, then coming back, and getting caught. And then in the last scene, the young woman who had tended his dying mother (from whom he stole money, btw) touches his hand and lo, the love of this good woman has redeemed him! Omg, such redemption, such grace!

Fucking bullshit. Reprehensible crap. If you want to watch a complex movie about a character becoming a thief, go watch Bicycle Thieves, which is literally infinity times better on every dimension. Every critic who has praised this shit must be some kind of super-old dude who bought into a lot of narrative tropes that have no currency in modernity.

Oh, actually, this is too fucking perfect. From Pete:

Pickpocket exerted a formative influence over the work of Paul Schrader, who has described it as “an unmitigated masterpiece” and “as close to perfect as there can be”, and whose films American Gigolo, Patty Hearst, and Light Sleeper all include endings similar to that of Pickpocket.[6] In addition, his screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver bears many similarities, including confessional narration and a voyeuristic look at society.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Ugh. Bleah.