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Robert Bresson's answer to how he did it is as simple as the Count of Monte Cristo's, "with difficulty." Lyon during the Occupation, the car ride to prison has the French lieutenant (François Leterrier) with his hand on the door handle, he's brought in bloodied and manacled. He promises he won't try again and readily starts planning his escape, a matter of flesh versus stone. "One hundred unfortunates awaiting our fate," nothing to do but find a way out, "a reconnaissance mission." Realism so concentrated it becomes surreal—spoon into chisel, bedding into wire, cloth into rope. (A bonus has a prisoner in the yard still in his wedding tuxedo.) He hesitates and then the choice is made for him, thus the tousled young deserter (Charles Le Clainche) suddenly sharing his cell. "It's a blessing." "Or a trap." The purest, most beautiful application of Bresson's method, "sans ornaments" and yet ecstatic in its keen asceticism. The artist might be a monk rattling inside the cathedral, first and foremost he's a humble problem-solver, the obsessed human center of a network of fortified walls. "I was downstairs for 15 days... or 15 years!" Grand Illusion is the point of departure, cooperation among convicts is grudging and perilous, executions are heard but not seen. Iris of the peephole, stopover in Hotel Terminus. One learns to listen in solitude: The crunch of glass and gravel, the distant whistle of a train, the squeaky bicycle of a nocturnal sentry. ("The wind blows where it wishes," goes the old book, "and you hear the sound of it...") The Rififi heist from the previous year prepares the escape with grappling hook, the reward is a throb of Mozart and a screenful of steam. "If only my mother could see me." Le Trou, L'Armée des ombres, Escape from Alcatraz... Cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel. With Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod, Jacques Ertaud, Jean Paul Delhumeau, and Roger Treherne. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |