[On the occasion of the film's acquisition by IFC and its recent trip to Cannes, Lena Dunham writes about just why The Pleasure of Being Robbed is such a gem]

Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed tells the story of Eleonore, a preternaturally lovely but inconsolably lost young woman. She runs high on charisma and low on morals, at least in any traditional sense. Wandering aimlessly through a New York City that is just a little unstuck in time, she encounters characters that seem to hail from your apartment building, your liberal arts college and Woody Allen’s Big Apple. She sees a guy walking a purse as if it’s a dog. A mournful trumpeter chills on her fire escape, at home like he’s Hepburn singing "Moon River". A bundle of contradictions, Eleonore slouches through life but has a bright, curious pair of eyes.

Her major quirk: She swipes whatever she can find, running the gamut from purses to cars to a bag of kittens with a rowdy poodle thrown into the sack for good measure. The opening scene finds her warmly hugging a confused stranger for just long enough to slip the purse off of the woman’s arm. How does she get away with it? Why does she have so much time on her hands? You'll be so immersed in the magical-fakism that these questions won't occur to you until after the credits roll - the same way you won't realize that your purse is gone until it's too late.

Eleonore gives no explanation for her klepto tendencies. In fact, she remains alarmingly casual about her misdeeds until a climactic scene in which her pathos and desperation rear their ugly head during a tussle with an uptown mom over the contents of a fancy handbag. It speaks to the sympathetic eye of the filmmaker that, despite her wantonly inappropriate behavior, Eleonore is ultimately allowed catharsis, given the chance to become a little girl again (if only for a moment) via a fantasy encounter with a polar bear from the Central Park Zoo. Although it precedes Eleonore’s mournful walk of shame to the police station, her surreal baptism has an unabashed optimism that reminds us escape is possible. In fact, it’s why we go to the movies.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed is the product of Red Bucket Films, a collective of cinematic experimenters with a rare passion for the medium of film. Film film. The celluloid stuff, the messy uncertainty of it all. Safdie and the gang’s freewheeling approach is evident in more than just the loose, improv-based dialogue and rough-hewn craftsy art direction of Robbed: the film itself has been explained as an “accidental feature.” When shooting began, it was unclear what the length of the film would ultimately be. The crew just shot until they sensed they were done, often taking to the New York City streets to nab prominent locations without the aid of a permit. As a result, the resulting document feels as though it was made on borrowed time. Scenes are stolen, as quick, furtive, and exhilarating as Eleonore’s defiantly open acts of thievery.

Although Red Bucket is a boy’s club with lots of now-archaic expertise--16mm, set-construction, fabricating polar-bear suits, its members are blessedly open to input from the characters they encounter in their everyday lives. With their previous short film work We’re Going To The Zoo and The Back of Her Head, they have proven that they have an eye for cartoonish personalities and a flair for casting non-actors. In one scene from Robbed a man who seems far too sweaty and doughy to be an invention walks into a darkened bar and screams, “Drinks on me!” before realizing what he’s done and running out again. Indeed, Robbed is populated with painfully, wildly real characters. Their skin mottled and their voices trembling, they appear and disappear in real time. One-take wonders.

The most notable of these is Eleonore Hendricks, the actress who lends her name and face to the leading role. As Safdie’s co-writer, Hendricks’ contribution gives Robbed a subtly shaded range of emotion that I feel the embarrassing urge to call “feminine.” Safdie’s signature grand comic gestures and cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz’s painterly visuals are in full effect, but Hendricks acts as the mute on the instrument, bringing in essential moments of sadness and verite.

Safdie assists in this process with a super-natural performance as a sensitive, yearning young man who unwittingly helps Eleonore steal a car, then teaches her to drive and accompanies her on a spontaneous road trip. This unlicensed journey is a poetically apt metaphor for the film’s medium, as well as its message.

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