A young recluse, Michel, drawn inexorably to picking pockets on the Metro and at the horse races, suffers a self-imposed anguish-not guilt, but a kind of performance anxiety, based on his Nietzschean theories of the superior man. Michel's bewilderment as to his motivations is as thorough as ours, which is only one of the fascinating aspects of Bresson's masterpiece, obliquely but famously based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Bresson's first film shot in the city-the streets, cafes, and subways of Paris-is a brilliant ballet of fingers, hands, glances, legs, watches, wallets, gazes from strangers indifferent or wary by turns. Everything is observable, isolated. In this way, Bresson ingeniously hones our eye to the director's vision: while we imagine we are seeing through the eyes of the character, we look into his soul. Through the love of Jeanne, the young neighbor of his aged mother, Michel achieves salvation in what may be the most moving, startling, simple gesture in all of cinema.