There is a specificity of texture to The Only Living Pickpocket in New York that is singularly what New York is like on film. The way the city is shot is not the same way we shoot other cities. New York is a melting pot of the American Dream writ large and so that is always uniquely captured, when New York plays itself. The city has changed over the years but some of the folks living in it still play by old New York rules.
Ye olde pickpocketing skills may no longer be of practical use. Modern times require modern solutions. So, Harry (John Turturro), must adapt some of his archaic analog tendencies to a digital age of credit cards and two-factor verification. When he lifts the duffle bag of a well-connected young man (Will Price), he’s found out through traffic cameras, tracked down, and made to go recover some important items he tried to shift at various pawn shops. Now Harry is up against the clock and a new world he doesn’t understand as he backtracks through the New York he once relied upon, which now offers more barriers than answers.
In Noah Segan’s sophomore feature, the texture of the city is painted on old stoops where neighbors tell tall tales, bodegas where anything is available at any time, and a soundtrack which poignantly begins with LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” because to really be brought down by a place, maybe you need to really love it first.
The old Bressonian way of pickpocketing is dead. It’s still practiced but lifted items aren’t where the money is. Harry still abides by the good old laws of sleight of hand. It’s an art for him but the practitioners of this art are being left behind in an age of two-factor verification and all of our money being held digitally. Harry and his New York are of the past, and as the city moves forward, so too does its crime.
Unlike the down-on-his-luck Bressonian loner, Harry has something to live for. His pickpocketing is in service of taking care of his partner, who isn’t well. Most of his relationships and family dynamics have been fractured after years of petty crime and so taking care of his paralyzed wife is like an act of atonement. When the latest scheme goes wrong, his wife is held captive until Harry can backtrack and recover some of what he sold off from his theft.
This process turns the present New York into a kind of spiritual limbo, where this aged crook can no longer finesse his way through the size of this new problem. There’s no good end in it for him, his recovery mission is a march to death, and his life, and the choices he has made, come to bear as Harry tries to find his way out. But there is no way back to his old New York, there’s no path of salvation here, only a city he loved that is no longer his city, and a life of crime that has finally come to an end.
There is a good texture and feeling to the film. The spaces and places of its New York are yearning and expressive and the people inhabited these spaces, are also drawn from sharp character portraits. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York takes the Bressonian model and adds ethos, and characters who have hard luck but also our sympathy. It’s a well-drawn, vital little film, that moves nicely on its premise, and delivers well as a character piece.