Editorial Reviews and
DVD Information about
A Man Escaped
Amazon.com
"This story is true," reads the opening statement of A Man Escaped. "I give it as it is, without embellishment." Based on the memoir by Andre Devigny, a member of the French Resistance imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Gestapo during the German occupation, Bresson (himself at one time a German POW) transforms Devigny's daring escape into an ascetic film of documentary detail. Kept in a tiny stone cell with a high window and a thick wooden door, the prisoner (renamed Fontaine in the film) makes himself intimate with his world--every surface of his room, every sound reverberating through the hall, and every detail of the prison's layout that he can absorb in brief sojourns from his cell. Bresson magnifies every detail with insistent close-ups and detailed examinations of every step of Fontaine's plan, from constructing and hiding ropes and hooks to painstakingly carving out an exit in the heavy cell door, and provides a sort of Greek chorus of fellow prisoners. This is Bresson's first film to feature a completely nonprofessional cast drilled to master precise movements and deliver lines without dramatic inflection. The effect is a drama where the slightest gesture carries the weight of a confession. Bresson's films are not for everybody, and this austere picture hardly carries the visceral punch of The Great Escape, but it's a drama of profound power, with a gripping climax that's as absorbing and tense as any high-energy action film. --Sean Axmaker
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Customer Reviews for
A Man Escaped
Redundant but well worth seeing
I'm a great admirer of Bresson's films. I appreciate his simplicity, and his refusal to churn out "professional" films that have little substance or artistic merit. His "Diary of a Country Priest" is one of the best films of the twentieth century.
But it seems to me that his "A Man Escaped" is flawed. The film is a pretty straightforward cinematic parallel to a memoir published after WWII of the imprisonment and escape of a French resistance fighter. In putting the story on film, Bresson uses a voice-over that reads portions of the text while showing scenes in which the actors perform what's being read. The upshot is that the effect is slightly pedantic--not enough to make the movie a bust, but just enough to be noticeable, thereby rupturing the film's flow. The viewer doesn't need to hear the main character tell you that he's filing down his dinner spoon so that he can make a chisel out of it while he's filing down his dinner spoon to make a chisel out of it. There's a strange redundancy here for a director well-known for his minimalist approach.
On the other hand, the cinematography in this, as in most of Bresson's films, is excellent. It's also the case that the actors, all of whom were nonprofessional, are quite good. So "A Man Escaped" deserves three and a half--and maybe a full four--stars.A Man Escaped
A great film...a poor DVD.
I first saw "A Man Escaped" in my Introduction to Cinema Studies course during my freshman year at college. It immediately became one of the greatest films I had ever seen. Over time, my feeling on it has evolved to the point that it is now one of my favorite films as well. The story is told in a sparse, visually narrow style that forces the viewer to imagine as well as simply watch. The prison is never seen as a whole; we are only shown pieces of it--a wall, a doorway, and so on. The German prison guards are more often only heard as footsteps coming to Fontaine's cell door. Rarely do we venture outside of Fontaine's cell once he is imprisoned, and when we do, it is usually to the same place, where he washes himself with the other prisoners. With the exception of the end, the plot of the movie revolves entirely around Fontaine's plan and exeuction of an escape. The magic of the film is that Bresson makes these minutiae indescribably watchable; we are invested in Fontaine's every action through the whole of the film, and we watch with anticipation as he grows closer to his goal with each passing month, day, minute. "A Man Escaped" is a beautifully rendered work of cinema, and it will appeal to everyone who wishes to do more than while away the time seeing a simple 'movie'.
As to the New Yorker DVD listed here, I'm afraid it is severly lacking in quality. The print used is dirty and dark, and the transfer itself suffers from a poor PAL to NTSC conversion that results in 'combing' and 'ghosting' (For those not technically inclined, this basically means that the film runs faster than an American film, but the difference in speed was not properly accounted for, causing a sort of blurriness in some scenes). There are also no special features, save for a few trailers for other Bresson films. As of the date of this review, the New Yorker disc is $26.99, and in my opinion that is simply too much to pay for a DVD that is this mediocre.
My suggestion is this:
A company in the UK called Artificial Eye has just released a new DVD of "A Man Escaped" this April. The picture quality is greatly improved and, because the UK uses the same PAL encoding system, there was no need for a conversion, which eliminates the combing and interlacing problems found on the New Yorker disc. Besides that, there is also a wonderful Dutch documentary (with English subtitles) called "The Road to Bresson" which is almost an hour long and features interviews with Andrei Tarkovsky, Louis Malle, and Paul Schrader amongst others. There is also footage of the notoriously camera-shy director accepting his award for Best Director (for "L'Argent") at the 1983 Cannes film festival. Finally, the documentary includes a delightful surprise at the end which I will not ruin here. On Amazon.co.uk the AE DVD is priced at £11.98, which is actually cheaper than the New Yorker with the current conversion rate. The disc is coded for Region 2 in the UK, so it will not work on a TV or DVD player in the USA unless both the TV and DVD player have multi-region capability and you have a PAL to NTSC converter box. However, the disc can be viewed on any PC by using any of a series of free media players widely available on the internet that circumvent region coding.
In short, if you value this film as much as I do, and want some value for your money, then skip this disappointment from New Yorker and pick up the Artificial Eye release instead.A Man Escaped
A Man Escaped
Bresson's spare but breathless film mesmerizes with the ring of truth. Based on Andre Devigny's own harrowing story, the prisoner's dogged efforts serve as powerful testament to man's ingenuity and will to survive. Leterrier is excellent as Fontaine (based on Devigny). Often unbearably suspenseful, this title offers large rewards in a small, understated package. Don't let it escape.A Man Escaped
"I kept on working. It stopped me from thinking. I had to open this door."
"On my right, no one. An empty cell. On my left, a neighbor who didn't answer my tapping." So the French prisoner tells us in this film as we look at him (in black & white) in a concrete cell. We rarely see the few German guards in this film and we hear almost nothing from them...or from anyone besides our prisoner and a few of his fellow inmates (when they are throwing out trash together or washing up). 80% of the dialogue in this film is actually a first person monologue, actually (which hardly conveys the tension others characterize this film as having more than its fair share of).
From a spoon he holds back from soup our prisoner tells us, "I made a kind of chisel." "I couldn't work fast, because of the noise I made and the constant fear of being caught. I kept having to sweep under the door with a piece of straw from my broom." "I kept on working. It stopped me from thinking. I had to open this door. I had no other plans." "Three boards would give me room enough." He tells us of he neighbor's silence scaring him then. "I plugged up the holes with paper I'd soiled on the floor." "After three weeks, working as quietly as possible, I was able to separate, lengthwise, three boards. But they were still in the frame, fastened by joints which bent my spoon. To dislodge them from the frame I needed another spoon. Only then could I force them hard enough." Then we see two spoons employed after he swipes another during an intervening scene. "I busted the frame, but more than I'd intended. I was able to put the piece back in place." "After one month's work my door was open." (Perhaps half of the speech of this film's 100 minutes passes by in this manner.) Then, in this instance, we see him slide a panel in the door and lift it out of line and put his face up to the opening.
During all of the above explanation, by the way, the director gives us close-ups of what is actually happening and what this prisoner is actually doing at the moment. The dialogue, thus, you could say, is rather redundant throughout most of this film. We don't see much besides the prisoner's cell, a room with sinks, a courtyard and sundry hallways. Mind you, the film does build, to some extent, to its denouement, but it ends rather abruptly. All in all, it was worth watching, in my opinion, but then again, It didn't cost me anything to view "A Man Escaped." By all means buy this film if such is your inclination, but I believe you'll be more satisfied having simply rented it (if possible). CheersA Man Escaped
Tense WWII prison escape
French director Robert Bresson who also wrote the screenplay, based on the wartime memoirs of Andre Devigny, fashioned an enthralling, nervewracking recounting of an elaborate prison break during the height of WWII.
Francois Leterrier playing Lt. Fontaine is captured by the Nazis in 1943 Lyons for sabotage of a bridge. After being beaten severely by the Gestapo, he's thrown into prison to await his fate. While being incarcerated within a claustrophobic cell he conjures up a plan to escape. He begins by taking apart the door to his cell gaining him access to the corridors of the prison. He constructs ropes and hooks with the meagre contents of his tiny abode.
With his plan finally complete after many painstaking months of preparation, he is summoned for his final judgement. Given a death sentence he must act immediately, when he suddenly gets a cellmate, a young Frenchman who he must either bring along or kill.
Bresson adroitly creates an aura of solitude and severe unease with a minimum of dialogue in this underappreciated flick. He expertly conveys the desperation of Lt. Fontaine as his very existence hangs in the balance.A Man Escaped
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