The Means of Escape
Robert Bresson's 1956 film A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle òu il veut) is a suspense film of the highest order. Based on a memoir by World War Two French Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film takes place mostly in a prison run by Germans in Lyon, part of Vichy France, but by then, 1943, the Germans had occupied this former section of France that had been run, after the 1940 Nazi conquest, by a puppet regime.
The film details in the minutest focused way, the persistent efforts of the prisoner (his name changed to Fontaine for the film) to escape first his cell, then make it over the inner wall, then the outer wall. He thinks in terms of one thing at a time, helped here and there by other prisoners in their note-passing system, their possession of forbidden pencils, their brief verbal communications while they communally wash themselves.
Fontaine's first big break comes when he keeps his soup spoon, the guard not noticing it's missing from the soup tin. Fontaine files the end of the handle on the floor, risking the noise, always alert for guards' footsteps. He makes a chisel out of the spoon, which also serves as a screwdriver when he dismantles parts of his bed frame to get at the wires supporting the mattress. He wraps these wires around hooks (made from a lantern frame high on his cell wall) that he'll need as grapples when he tries the walls. He makes ropes from sheets and also from a lifesaving package allowed him from his family. The box is full of clothes which he tears with a confiscated razor blade into strips. Bed frame wire makes the ropes hold together. His plan gets possibly foiled by the addition of a roommate, a sixteen year old French boy who had been conscripted into the German army but had somehow proved inadequate. Fontaine suspects the boy is a snitch--he has blonde hair, his name is Jost. He debates for several days and nights on whether or not to kill him. If he were to do so, he knows that the heaviest of the grappling hooks would be the weapon to use.
Things come to a point of ultimate decision when the authorities decide to execute him in the near future. When he's taken back to his cell, he's relieved, since it was this particular cell, with its particular door (three of its boards near the bottom spoon-chiseled out and easily removed and replaced, but not apparent as a portal of escape to the naked eye) that serves as not only his cell but also as the base of operations for his eventual escape.
The processes of this one man trying always to make happen one act of freedom puts the film into the Bresson tendency to focus on an individual's struggles, whether that be Joan of Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc) or a donkey transferred from owner to owner (Au Hasard Balthazar). After his first two films from the 1940s, Bresson switched from casting known actors and actresses to working with unknowns. In these films, when you see the credits, it's likely you've never heard of these people. Nadine Nortier, who played the lead in Mouchette (my favorite Bresson movie) was only in that one film, yet her performance is as memorable and affecting as the work of many fine and famous actresses.
Fontaine is played by François Leterrier, who went on to film directing. His long handsome face has a patient look to it. He depicts relentless determination, water wearing down stone.
The film's premise hinges on a man in an increasingly desperate situation. There is constant suspense, sometimes very low intensity, but it derives from the ever present possibility of getting caught doing something that could get him shot. If a guard were to close his door forcefully, for example, the chiseled boards might clatter to the stone floor. Fontaine, at the beginning of the film, tries to escape when he's being driven to the prison. He's warned that another escape attempt will get him killed.
I emphasize the film's suspense because it isn't often that an "art" film is associated with a mesmerizing thriller concept. Hitchcock's suspense films are not always suspenseful. They intermingle calmer scenes with intense moments and the buildups leading to those moments. Or, as in The Birds, the first half is a lead up to what's coming: solid disturbing suspense punctuated by horror.
A Man Escaped, since it focuses so sharply on Fontaine's effort to free himself, becomes a meditation on suspense as a technique, but also a religious meditation--a trial of the spirit seeking a bursting forth from bondage. In the end, it's a resurrection, as the film's secondary title relates, quoting from the Gospel of John: "The wind blows where it will," a line preceded in the Gospel by the admonition, "You must be born again."
Fontaine's spirit is what helps him get born again.
Vic Neptune
Robert Bresson's 1956 film A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle òu il veut) is a suspense film of the highest order. Based on a memoir by World War Two French Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film takes place mostly in a prison run by Germans in Lyon, part of Vichy France, but by then, 1943, the Germans had occupied this former section of France that had been run, after the 1940 Nazi conquest, by a puppet regime.
The film details in the minutest focused way, the persistent efforts of the prisoner (his name changed to Fontaine for the film) to escape first his cell, then make it over the inner wall, then the outer wall. He thinks in terms of one thing at a time, helped here and there by other prisoners in their note-passing system, their possession of forbidden pencils, their brief verbal communications while they communally wash themselves.
Fontaine's first big break comes when he keeps his soup spoon, the guard not noticing it's missing from the soup tin. Fontaine files the end of the handle on the floor, risking the noise, always alert for guards' footsteps. He makes a chisel out of the spoon, which also serves as a screwdriver when he dismantles parts of his bed frame to get at the wires supporting the mattress. He wraps these wires around hooks (made from a lantern frame high on his cell wall) that he'll need as grapples when he tries the walls. He makes ropes from sheets and also from a lifesaving package allowed him from his family. The box is full of clothes which he tears with a confiscated razor blade into strips. Bed frame wire makes the ropes hold together. His plan gets possibly foiled by the addition of a roommate, a sixteen year old French boy who had been conscripted into the German army but had somehow proved inadequate. Fontaine suspects the boy is a snitch--he has blonde hair, his name is Jost. He debates for several days and nights on whether or not to kill him. If he were to do so, he knows that the heaviest of the grappling hooks would be the weapon to use.
Things come to a point of ultimate decision when the authorities decide to execute him in the near future. When he's taken back to his cell, he's relieved, since it was this particular cell, with its particular door (three of its boards near the bottom spoon-chiseled out and easily removed and replaced, but not apparent as a portal of escape to the naked eye) that serves as not only his cell but also as the base of operations for his eventual escape.
The processes of this one man trying always to make happen one act of freedom puts the film into the Bresson tendency to focus on an individual's struggles, whether that be Joan of Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc) or a donkey transferred from owner to owner (Au Hasard Balthazar). After his first two films from the 1940s, Bresson switched from casting known actors and actresses to working with unknowns. In these films, when you see the credits, it's likely you've never heard of these people. Nadine Nortier, who played the lead in Mouchette (my favorite Bresson movie) was only in that one film, yet her performance is as memorable and affecting as the work of many fine and famous actresses.
Fontaine is played by François Leterrier, who went on to film directing. His long handsome face has a patient look to it. He depicts relentless determination, water wearing down stone.
The film's premise hinges on a man in an increasingly desperate situation. There is constant suspense, sometimes very low intensity, but it derives from the ever present possibility of getting caught doing something that could get him shot. If a guard were to close his door forcefully, for example, the chiseled boards might clatter to the stone floor. Fontaine, at the beginning of the film, tries to escape when he's being driven to the prison. He's warned that another escape attempt will get him killed.
I emphasize the film's suspense because it isn't often that an "art" film is associated with a mesmerizing thriller concept. Hitchcock's suspense films are not always suspenseful. They intermingle calmer scenes with intense moments and the buildups leading to those moments. Or, as in The Birds, the first half is a lead up to what's coming: solid disturbing suspense punctuated by horror.
A Man Escaped, since it focuses so sharply on Fontaine's effort to free himself, becomes a meditation on suspense as a technique, but also a religious meditation--a trial of the spirit seeking a bursting forth from bondage. In the end, it's a resurrection, as the film's secondary title relates, quoting from the Gospel of John: "The wind blows where it will," a line preceded in the Gospel by the admonition, "You must be born again."
Fontaine's spirit is what helps him get born again.
Vic Neptune
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