For anyone who’s had the pleasure of being robbed

In 2007, Josh Safdie was hired by Andy Spade and Anthony Sperduti to create a short film featuring Kate Spade Handbags. After several failed attempts at the commercial, he devised a concise story about the adventures of a kleptomaniac woman.

Eleonore Hendricks, who co-wrote the screenplay, also plays the lead.

There is no insight into her mind; all that is divulged is that she is a terrible Ping-Pong player and doesn’t know how to drive, though she picks that up rather quickly when shuttling a friend home to Boston in a stolen Volvo. She has a cherubic sense of innocence – the few moments where the film could veer into romance are swiftly batted away in favour of silence or laughter. She’s seemingly thoughtless, but also passionate, vivacious – reminiscent of the protagonists in French New Wave, or Run Lola Run. 

Where the film works is in its treatment of plot as a series of episodes, perhaps related, perhaps not. It is almost a gag-based series of sequences of meeting ‘friends’ and taking spur of the moment trips. There is a wild, uncompromised sense of the bohemian New York City life, one that accurately reminds you of the American underground films of the 60s, such as Shadows – reviewed on LMO. 

This structure possibly has its roots in the short films Josh and his brother Benny Safdie had created before this, shot guerilla-style around New York. Today, though, they are known as the anxiety-inducing, sweat wizards of Good Time and Uncut Gems fame. 

You’re unsure if many of the moments are documentary or staged. Sometimes a scene takes place in the foreground and as the characters move on and the camera stays in place, passerbys engage in beautiful small actions and behaviours. This is a film where New York City is as much a strange beast of a character as the two or three other main cast.  It is always clear in films when the director actually lives in the city that he is filming. He knows the streets, he knows the faces, and he knows the energy. 

At one point near the end of the film a man is shown filming his son at the playground. The father tells him to fill up his pale with sand and run it down the slide. The son questions this, saying it’s ‘dumb and weird.’ The father responds, ‘No, it will be cool for our movie.’

Shot on grainy 16mm, usually at night, the film has a phantasmagoric quality rarely seen today. Eleonore’s theft is motivated by nothing in particular – it does not seem to be the excitement, nor the loneliness. In one brief episode in a bar, she thieves some dollars from an unattended bag only to then procure drinks for the duped couple. In another, she unsubtly pops grapes in full view of the neighbouring stall owner – in a strange question of justice and secrecy. 

At one point the director makes an extended appearance. It’s a fair subversion of the auteur – where the invisible director takes you on a tour of his psyche – when the director appears as a guiding spirit within the film’s universe. He is a helpful sprite who cycles into her life, their relationship is never clarified, never explained. That is where the film is mature – there is no concerted effort in the exposition. We can call it style over substance, but it is more simply a ‘Nothing’ movie (see: LMO, Week 8). 

In these type of ‘Nothing’ movies, in the vein of Jarmusch, the little things become fascinating. Something like a well-executed parallel park becomes the most pleasing moment in an extended sequence. 

At the film’s climax, she’s caught. She does not try to run away, though she could. She repeats to the disgruntled Karen ‘I just want to look through it’ over and over and over again. She is clearly not a sociopath. A sociopath has no interest in how others feel. She goes as far as to rob other people just to know them.

Also, everyone in New York seems to live on a futon.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2007), USA

Directed by Josh Safdie

Available on MUBI.