A Man Escaped

Will Menaker5.0

The true story of a French resistance fighter who broke out of the notorious Montluc prison in Klaus Barbie's Lyon, where 7,000 men where executed during the German occupation. Bresson does this thing where he never shows any of the prison guards' faces or gives them names or any discernible personality or character. The film remains in tight focus on the main character's face and especially his hands. His captors are abstracted, their cruelty and oppression is never dramatized or given a face or name, we just hear the clink of their keys, the shuffle of their feet, a barked order to stop talking, and the staccato of machine gun fire as they execute another prisoner. The grinding routine and monotony of incarceration become a meditative koan. It's the nazis in this case, but it could be anything. This is one man's life but it could be anybody living deprived of freedom with their head on the butcher's block. A deeply spiritual film about enduring this life and maintaining some slim hope in the face of our inevitable death."The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." - John 3:8

Melissa Tamminga5.0

"With both hands, I restrained the beating of my heart."

Josh Lewis5.0

A biographical prison escape "thriller" as a formally stripped-down, meticulously-detailed process of human resilience in the face of historical deprivation and isolation. Bresson displays a truly singular and astonishing level of commitment to avoiding all sense of easy, contrived melodrama and instead using every tool at his disposal to achieve a rigorous purity of internal expression as an accumulation of simple, concrete physical action and gesture. The locked-in visual/sonic spatial perspective is particularly masterful; teaching us right from the opening scene to become sensitive to his subjective sight lines, method of thinking, and direct unexaggerated experiences which have been written and directed by men who shared it in real life. There is so much deliberate focus on keeping his eyes away from Nazi guards (reduced to imposing periphery figures) and ears pointed towards any useful information he can gather from their footsteps or gunfire, as well as the mundane, monotonous routine of how people are beaten into submission and hollowed out. But also how that same routine with the right patience, planning, and execution can be just as valuable a weapon to those willing to endure and maintain faith even in the bleakest, harshest, emptiest conditions. Love all the scenes of him resourcefully fashioning his makeshift escape instruments and all but I'm going to be thinking about that scene where his tapping on the wall unknowingly prevents his neighbor's suicide for some time. One of the best ever. Full on ep 292 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.