A Man Escaped

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.

The stoically minimized material, a man's precisely prepared, calculated, and then executed escape from a Nazi-prison, effectively builds up an astonishingly intense tension. (For that matter, only similar film I can recall is Cluzot's Wages of Fear, made a couple of years earlier.) In this very quiet A Man Escaped, only music is sporadically inserted Mozart, but it might have worked better without any music.

Bresson audaciously began realism and stood alone in pre-New-Wave France, but left tremendous influences on generations of filmmakers to come.

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.

Pages and pages of film criticism could be, and most likely have been, written about this film, so I will just include my simple wholehearted recommendation, in the hopes that whoever is reading this will seek out "A Man Escaped" immediately. I can think of few films with a simpler premise and plot line - it really is only about an anonymous man in prison attempting to escape. That's it. Yet, director Robert Bresson, more than any other director I can think of (with the exception of Yasujiro Ozu), can imbue the drab everyday details of life with life-and-death importance. This director could make a movie about a guy tying his shoes into a riveting cinematic experience. His style of film-making is completely unobtrusive and restrained, because he has figured out a simple truth that about 95% of all film directors never realize: the less a director tries to "push" his ideas through a film, ironically, the greater the range of ideas he is able to elicit in his audience. You bring to this movie whatever life experience and ideas you carry with you; an older child as well as an aging philosophy professor can enjoy this film equally, and for very different reasons. In addition, I believe this is also the most realistic film that I have ever seen. It takes the skill of a master to make reality into great cinema, and this film is one of Bresson's greatest. It could even be his greatest, because though his other films "Au Hasard Balthazar" and "Pickpocket" are great masterpieces, they can never have the same kind of accessibility to virtually any living person in the world as this has.

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.