Um Condenado à Morte Escapou

A MAN ESCAPED is a great war drama about despair and unbearable circumstances from which a man tries to escape. The main protagonist is an activist of the resistance movement. He was arrested after one action. After the initial shock, the young man begins to plan an escape from prison, and he moves in a race against time because his enemies threaten him with liquidation.

The story is honest and realistic in many segments. The plot is, if we ignore the mystical introduction, very simple. Scenery is confined to a very small space, which directly contributes to an increased sense of fear, despair and anxiety of the main character. Mr. Bresson made the film without specific decorations, classic turnaround and growing tensions. Simply, the focus is on the prisoner who tried to escape. The plot is realistic and spontaneous. One young man must choose between life and certain death. He was on his own in the inner monologue on the difficult road to knowledge.

François Leterrier as Lieutenant Fontaine is calm and dedicated to the inner struggle. His performance is impressive. It's hard to believe that he is not a professional actor. His appearance is unreal and convincing. This is evident in his haggard and engrossed face, bloody shirt and torn stockings.

This film is a reflection of a cruel experience. One man in a desperate, depressed and uncertain fight for his life, or perhaps some form of redemption.

I hit an impasse with Bresson's previous film, Diary; he used a peculiar conflation of a search for transparent truth in the mysteries of life with anguish and dejection as romanticized spiritual journey, romanticized in the Christian sense where it's not spiritual if it doesn't have anguish. It seemed crude and without enlightenment.

The impasse was; was the pious young priest for Bresson another person among others in the village led astray in the effort to rationalize his emotions, or was he above them, an ideal to aspire to? This was more interesting to me than the film itself.

So I came to this hoping for the fresh light of retrospect. And what a stark contrast this is! Another idealistic young man who suffers torments, physical and inner, another life of anguish in four walls. But here Bresson draws the breath in, quiets the anguish, accepts the fact of it, and works to concentrate the senses and create physical presence. We've come far in our ability to do this, but it still resonates.

The film is practically a long suspense piece, with a few questions about ethics suspended briefly. The man here, by contrast to the priest, simply does the work he sets out before him. He doesn't perceive himself a martyr of his cause, or a quiet sufferer of wrongs, he simply abides and prepares for the long night. His idealism waits to be found out until near the end when the charges against him are laid out; sabotage.

It's fine work, easy to parse. It doesn't answer the impasse mentioned above so for that I'll have to go to his next one.

Though the title seems to ruin the ending, the movie isn't boring for a moment. Suspense to the end. Marvelous filmmaking. The movie follows slowly and quietly the day of the prisoner who's to be executed and plans an escape. I don't know what else to say. You have to watch this. 32 of the 46 voters gave it a 10! Genius. They don't make movies like this often. Must See for movie lovers and all.

Was there ever a sparer, more concentrated film? The painstaking focus on the ritual-like preparation for the escape is almost wrenching in its calm severity; yet always graceful, always fluid. The details of the final escape make for one of the most memorable sequences in cinema - interspersed with episodes of doubt in which he falters for hours or more before taking the next step, just as he delays the escape itself for many days even though he knows his execution is imminent. It's almost like a sombre dance with death, or at least a morally exacting examination of one's limits and a fear of the transcendent (which in this case is represented merely by freedom itself). There are no moments of light relief or variation here, just an attention to process and causality - the concentration on the plan almost becomes a means of redemption, until carrying out the plan becomes almost superfluous if not destructive. Of all Bresson's films, this is the one that best engages on a thematic level while simultaneously working as narrative - his distilled gravity constitutes a fantastically effective suspense mechanism; a model of tight storytelling.

Bresson's command of the cinematic language...and more importantly, his restraint... make this a very powerful story of one man's determination to find meaning in his actions, focused goal, and adherence to his beliefs.

Presumably tipping off the viewer with the title (A Man Escaped) we already suspect how it will end, and therefore the tension isn't in the final twists of the story, but rather, his journey to that place.

Narrative stripped down of all melodramatic trappings, the film manages to reveal a larger truth about man's struggle against unknowable odds, his struggle with himself, and his resolve to move forward. A couple of the side-characters are from the church, or pastors, which give the ongoing conversations in the common areas an added resonance to "grace" and a possibility of transcendental deliverance. Even though the lead character doesn't seem to truck much with religious faith.

He has his own - in his resolve to escape.

It's appropriate that we barely know why the lead character is in prison, only that he is already on the way there when the film starts. (And even then, tries a failed attempt to run from the car that is transporting him. So much for back-story. The character is revealed through his subsequent actions.)

A simple beautiful film focused on humanity at its most desperate, spare, and focused.