The Pleasure of Being Robbed

The Pleasure Of Being Robbed

79 Minutes

Joshua Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed is a dreamy little independent film that’s been well-enough received to have played at all the right festivals. It was the Closing Night film of the 2008 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, which is indicative of its mettle, or perhaps it’s just indicative that whoever set the schedule was possessed of a keen philosophic mind, and simply wanted to see what people elite enough to have attended that prestigious event would walk away thinking about. Pleasure is that kind of film, the kind that leaves you with something; but what, exactly, is another question.

Eleanore (capably played by Eleanore Hendricks) is a New York free-spirit reminiscent of Björk at her most urchin-like: lanky-haired, bedraggled, floating through Manhattan like a visitor from another dimension who didn’t pay attention during the part of the travel consultation that covered private property. Eleanore rifles through purses; eats grapes off the bunch at the corner deli while conversing with its owner; steals handbags and kittens and cars, not out of malice or hope for financial gain, but simply out of a desire to …well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Eleanore is portrayed as the sort of Dharma bum Kerouac was so taken with, a babe absorbed in the present, an innocent unconstrained by social norms. She seems to want little aside from the freedom to rummage through peoples’ artifacts, despite seeming to possess very little feeling about the people themselves. It’s hard to watch somebody buck the rules again and again, separating a bunch of overly-credulous New Yorkers from their stuff without hoping for the other shoe to drop. Surely it can’t be that easy? Surely a price must be paid?

Toward the end of the movie Eleanore’s behavior finally proves consequential. She’s arrested, cuffed and then the film launches into a surreal set of events peopled by Keystone Cops, a visit to the zoo and a dream sequence. So, is this film actually about anything? It’s difficult to find much profundity when the action is so contrived, the characters so flat and false, the emotional tenor so tepid and Eleanore herself so difficult to believe. (She comes up with rent how again?)

Still, it’s a pretty sort of fugue. Safdie has a painter’s eye, using urban elements like underground I-beams and crowded streets to frame his characters’ quiet moments and capture a certain kind of New York experience: waiting for subways while the tunnel wind blows your hair back, watching a bar full of vibrant drinkers talking and laughing, finding yourself a tiny pocket of quiet amidst the sound and the fury. Eleanore plays her Zen across the screen like a hypnotist’s pendulum, and despite yourself you do wonder, briefly, if life could be different than it is. One can take delight in the fantasy; but perhaps not quite enough. Pleasure is a thoughtful exploration of some weighty ideas, but in the end it’s too muddied and thin to amount to anything substantial.

by Shane Hoversten