Bleak Street extends, at times with dark absurdism, the hard critique of class inequity that has been a constant of Ripstein's films, here by revealing a vicious and unceasing cycle of exploitation that even drives the very poorest against one another. Bleak Street also introduces a newly ruminative tone into Ripstein’s cinema with its touching meditation on old age and obsolescence embodied by the weary figures of the aging prostitutes and battered wrestlers who find no escape from the brutal work that both defines and destroys them.