Pickpocket & The White Countess

Pickpocket is a Robert Bresson film, although it was influenced by Pickup on South Street (interestingly, an early title of that film was Pickpocket), which is obvious from the pickpocket scene on the Paris Metro. Both masterful scenes of subway robbery, although halfway through this one there's the excellent series of sleight of hand tricks in the train station that's just a tour-de-force of balletic robbery. Surprisingly ostentatious from a cinematic standpoint, especially relative to the extremely limited aspects of Bresson in general. The two leads were actually better than some of his other models, and the woman is both Eva Green's aunt, and was apparently in the original Emmanuelle (which I've never seen). Weird coincidence there. The main accomplice is played by Kassagi, a real-life sleight-of-hand artist, and there is a 12 minute TV show with him showing off. He's restrained in the movie, but that show is full of flash and broad jokes. Still, watching it to try to see how he was doing it was interesting. The film is quite good, and recommended viewing for Freddie Prinze, Jr. Maybe then he'd stop smirking. Then again, if I were a no-talent hack having sex with Buffy, I'd probably be smirking too.

The White Countess is set in late 30s Shanghai, as a blind American former diplomat and a former Russian Countess try to survive the upheaval that occurs due to the whole inevitable invasion by the Japanese. They seem to do that a lot in movies about China in the 30s. You'd think it was a traumatic experience to some Chinese or something? This film is the last Merchant-Ivory film. Which is a damn shame, considering how many films they've made, especially ones like A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day, based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, and who contributes the screenplay to this film. It starts out quite good, but the final scenes don't keep up with the slightly restrained earlier scenes. I mean, SPOILER, it ended happily for the people who deserved it, mainly, but I just didn't think it deserved to. Plus, it was too long. The acting was quite good, just the ending was not right, and it didn't feel entirely right.