(dir. Robert Bresson; France, 1956)
Robert Bresson’s existential masterpiece, “A Man Escaped,” is a deeply compelling motion picture, but, in conventional terms, anyway, nothing “interesting” happens until its final sequence. Bresson tells the story of a man named Fontaine (Francoise Letterier), a French Resistance fighter who, for the film’s entire running time, obsessively executes a plan to break out of a Nazi prison.
Since a single wrong move, or even a loud noise, can mean death for the protagonist, Bresson manages to wring unbearable tension out of such mundane activities as hiding a forbidden pencil stub, stealing a spoon, sweeping wood chips under a door, and peering at an almost bare courtyard.
Incredibly, the film is based on a true story, and that knowledge makes the situation all the more agonizing to watch. Bresson’s presentation of the material is as void of flourish as the painstaking, life-or-death activity he’s recording, and the results are unforgettable.
The opening sequence brilliantly establishes Bresson's bare-bones visual palette. We see a man’s hand slowly reaching for the door handle inside a moving car, gently pulling down on the handle, noting that the door isn’t locked, then returning to the man’s lap. Fontaine is riding in the back of a prison transport vehicle with two other captives, and he’s already checking to see if he can make a break for it. When the car slows down, and Fontaine is able to flee, Bresson lingers on the face of a remaining prisoner whose expression suggests utter defeat. The camera doesn’t barrel down the street with Fontaine, because there’s no need to— we’ll see soon enough that he’s been captured and brought back to the car. And, significantly, a guard will slap handcuffs on his wrists.
Later, after being beaten and thrown to the floor of a concrete cell, Fontaine falls into despairing sleep. Then, when he awakens, he returns to his plans of escape. Outside of occasional forays to a trough where he and the other prisoners wash up, his life will now consist of nothing but secret activities that might lead to his freedom.
Fontaine’s chances of slipping out seem bleak, to say the least. Guards, of course, walk the prison halls, and he has to stand on his cell’s sole wooden shelf in order to look through a barred window. Across the open courtyard, he sees a high cement wall. If he somehow manages to make it out of his lockup, he’ll have to contend with that, and any other obstacles that lie out of his (and our) site.
Letterier’s narration guides us through Fontaine’s thoughts as he solves the seemingly unsolvable puzzle of how to get away. Through this process, the character generates his own hope.
Bresson isn’t about to let us in on anything Fontaine doesn’t know himself. But he adds considerable texture to the film by visiting the near-silent society created by the inmates. Codes are tapped on walls. Notes are passed from hand to hand. Furtive messages are whispered through locked doors. The characters seem in a constant state of private confession, but recurring machine gun fire in the distance suggests that salvation is impossible. In Bresson's world, however, salvation can arise at a moment's notice.
When then-critic Francois Truffaut wrote about “A Man Escaped” upon its release in 1956, he marveled at its masterful sense of economy. “What is striking when one sees the film for the first time,” he noted, “is the constant contrast between what the work is and what it would be, or would have been, if it had been made by another filmmaker.”
Truffaut definitely had a point. Other pictures in the prison-escape genre either rely on barely believable can-do spirit ("The Great Escape" being the key, rah-rah offender) or nihilistic wish-fulfillment (Oliver Stone's nasty little screenplay for "Midnight Express.") But Bresson avoids such crowd-pleasing traps by creating a work that stands as a metaphor for the spirit rising from the body of man. In effect, he creates a passion play, and it's one of the more profoundly moving experiences in all of cinema.
When you watch it, you won't look away for a second.
Paul Tatara
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