Le petit voleur

Le petit voleur was really produced for the French arts channel ARTE and is the sequel to Erick Zonca’s successful début La vie rêvée des anges. Zonca’s latest film may be a smaller, but also more precise film than its predecessor, awaking the expectation that Zonca will soon produce a major masterpiece. Le petit voleur only lasts 65 minutes, but in that time we see how the young apprentice baker S. (Esse) from Orléans (Zonca’s birthplace) resigns from his job. He tells a girlfriend he never wants to do such boring work again. She lets him sleep with her, after which he steals her money. Then he joins a gang of outcasts who hang around a boxing club, but he is not half as hard as he thinks. He meekly boeys the orders of his new mates; he is even willing to clean the house of the gang leader’s grandmother. But however much he does his best to gain recognition, he doesn’t have the character to make the right decisions at critical moments. Where La vie rêvée des anges largely leaned on the charisma of its protagonists, Le petit voleur gains its power from its fascinating and unadorned realism. Under Zonca’s directing, the debutant Dechauvelle portrays with merciless concentration the silent S. as an authentic and devious crook who almost earns our sympathy.