The Little Thief: crime drama. Starring Nicolas Duvauchelle, Martial Bezot, Yann Tregouet, Jean-Armand Dalomba, Jean-Jerome Esposito. Screenplay by Virginie Wagon and Erick Zonca. Directed by Erick Zonca. In French with Subtitles. Now playing at The Lumiere and other Bay Area Theaters.

The director of the powerful and poignant Dreamlife with Angels returns with another fine film about life on the margins: The Little Thief, a sad and disturbing tale of one amoral teenager’s descent into crime and how the reality collides with his expectations.

Known only to us as S, (likely in order to put the audience at an objective distance) the kid (well played with gritty sullenness by Nicolas Duvauchelle) is on his way to becoming a professional baker in the French city of Orleans when the film opens. This chronic rebel without a cause, high on youthful testosterone, quits his job in a snit then brags to his pretty co-worker how he’s going to defy the System and never work for anyone ever again. Later that night, after bedding her, he rips off her pay packet and flees to Marseilles.

There he hooks up with a gang of small time burglars at a local boxing gym and embarks on what he thinks will be the high-life of professional crime. Unfortunately for him, what he knows about crime comes mostly from gangster movies and Spiderman comics.

When the movies portray criminals they almost inevitably glamorize and mythologize them to at least some extent (Sergio Leone mocked the idea in his opulent Once Upon a Time in America).  Not The Little Thief.   Miraculously, Zonca finds the right documentary-like attitude and tone towards this crass crew of crooks that strips them down to their true pathetic bones. While showing occasional glimmers of humanity, they are in truth grubby, often incompetent, bullies whose big shot self-images aren’t much more than a bad joke.  This makes The Little Thief something of a remarkable accomplishment.

S’s romantic attempt at rebellion quickly becomes a total wash. Before long he finds himself a worse slave than he was working in the bakery. The little thief lives a life more boring and oppressive than an apprenticed baker’s, as he’s forced to become first a runner, than a lookout for Mr. Big’s hooker/girlfriend and finally, Mr. Big’s chauffeur. It’s then that he licks the bottom of life, when his boss, after chickening out on a hit on another rival gangster, turns his frustrated rage on S in a scene of shocking brutality that the strips the youth of his last vestige of dignity.

In the end S accidentally causes the capture of his street captain during a botched burglary (in this scene, S doesn’t even bother stealing anything. He’s become so disillusioned all he can do is sit in an easy chair shaking his head in mortification). Afterwards, he tumbles even further down the ladder, driven to mugging old women. Soon he finds himself the quarry of pursuit by his old gang who brutally drive him back to the smaller but safer world from where he came.

The plot may seem familiar and the ending a touch on the obvious side, like something out of the old 1930s Warner Brothers social dramas, but co-writer/director Erich Zonca’s cinema-verite approach blows past the clichés to offer up a short, but compelling life-like story.  He achieves an unusual degree of realism. He never stoops to lecturing or preaching, but shows what life is like for many of those who ruthlessly work in society’s underbelly. The violence is blunt and brutal and the characterizations by the supporting cast deadly accurate. If you have rambunctious teenagers who are toying with the notion of criminal life, the harsh bleak vision of The Little Thief could help dissuade them.

Best of all, the film shows a side of life mostly missed in contemporary movies: a world untouched by the burgeoning wealth brought on by globalization, whose rising tide is surely drowning more than a few. It’s a way of life that is mercifully not lived by most of us in this part of the world, but shouldn’t be forgotten. Once again French filmmakers show they’re the best at showing life as it is.