This review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand.
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson.
It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
