New Yorker Video French master filmmaker Robert Bresson is often ...

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New Yorker Video

French master filmmaker Robert Bresson is often acclaimed by knowing cinephiles as the king of austerity, the cinematic equivalent of bran cereal: good for you, even if lacking in eye-popping flavor. This reputation is not wholly unearned, but A Man Escaped (1956), almost undoubtedly Bresson's greatest film, is a scorchingly concentrated jailbreak thriller with knuckle-biting intensity derived not from CGI wizardry but from careful attention to detail.

The setup is spare to the point of myth: A man finds himself imprisoned and is willing to risk his life to escape. This is presented as an almost biological condition of nature, with the concomitant desire to escape equally imperative. That the time is World War II, the prisoner French and his jailers German are facts both crucial and irrelevant to the endeavor. (Bresson himself was a POW during the war.) And yet, A Man Escaped is too much to be contained as simple history; its protagonist is a stand-in for all of us, imprisoned in our cells of mundanity and turpitude.

Part of the genius of A Man Escaped, and the reason why it remains Bresson's most successful film, is this doubleness. We watch the prisoner Fontaine and we hope, pray for his salvation. Bresson makes explicit the connection between escape and spirituality in a number of the film's sequences. In one, a priest tells Fontaine, "Read and pray-God will save you." Fontaine responds, "Only if we lend him a hand." Likewise, the two contraband items that are repeatedly passed from prisoner to prisoner are spoons for digging and scraps of scribbled Bible fragments. Both are avatars of hope for a "new life," as one of the prisoners puts it.

Bresson achieves his results through an almost preternatural patience and attention to detail. Fontaine slowly scrapes the gaps between the panels of his cell door, steadily creeping closer to escape. There is a nerve-wracking calm to these scenes, where little else seems to exist other than spoon, hands, wood. When he is ready, Fontaine takes two spoons in an attempt to dislodge the door's frame, and the effort, so quiet by the standards of an average film, is shatteringly loud.

Crucially, Fontaine does not, and cannot, escape by himself. It demands two people to escape, and while God will save only if He is lent a hand, man can save himself only with the help of others. The final sequence, in which the pair escapes, is as dramatic and profound as anything on celluloid. As his compatriot murmurs upon reaching freedom, "If my mother could see me now." In the blind groping in the dark called life, the glorious moment of reaching true freedom is one unlikely to repeat itself.

Saul Austerlitz