Taken to the Montluc prison in Lyon, France, a former member of the French Resistance is sentenced to death after a protracted imprisonment. He has hatched plans of escape, and a fellow prisoner by the name of Orsini has tried—and failed—to escape using his own plans. The countdown to his execution, after stalling for many months, makes every succeeding day a trial of uncertainty and fear; in the meantime, this prisoner whittles away at his plans, the wooden door through which he has fashioned a hole, the wires and ropes and hooks essential to his escape. And just before he makes his attempt, at the last moment, another prisoner arrives at his cell, a boy of sixteen with a suspicious allegiance to the Germans.
This is the spare, bare-bones plot of A Man Escaped, directed by Robert Bresson as the faithful product of his ascetic style. His actors, so affectless that their motives seem to have been contrived out of a dreamscape, are the agents of a sincere spiritual purpose that transcends them; all of them, nonprofessionals and non-actors, are subordinate to the strict ideals of the director’s conception of film as art. The atmosphere of this film (as of the others) is thus quiescent, suppressed, fitting its purposes as a glove its hand. Requiring patience and an openness to what the story may reveal, the pace and studied suppression of all acting can take on a luminous and stirring aspect, realized as the film nears its conclusion. (For the films of Bresson have no dénouement as such, no resolving of the plot strands; one looks on instead, as in a room gradually illumined by a lamplight.)
Without the suspense expected of the gamut of modern films and so many prison dramas, A Man Escaped reveals its outcome in the title. For it is not plot but character, not the if but the how, that sustains the momentum of the film culminating in the luminous transcendence of its last scenes. The asceticism of the Bresson film is that of a cinematic sage, a director with integrity. And this integrity alone justifies watching a film such as A Man Escaped, making it a worthwhile, repeatable experience that draws one into the whole oeuvre of the director as into a world of secrets—the other side of an eclipse.
