Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956)

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé is a French war film first released in 1956, directed by Robert Bresson.  The film is based on a book by André Devigny and stars François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod and Jacques Ertaud.  It has also been released under the title: A Man Escaped.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


In 1943, Lieutenant Fontaine is arrested by the Gestapo for involvement with the French Resistance and incarcerated at Montluc prison in Lyons.  Immediately, Fontaine becomes obsessed with the idea of escape.  He has nothing to lose.  It is only a matter of time before he will be executed by the Nazis.  With a spoon, sharpened into an improvised chisel, Fontaine painstakingly dismantles the door to his top floor cell.  He then makes a rope from blankets and the wire mesh of his bed.  Just as he is about to make his bid for freedom, another prisoner is placed in his cell, a young Frenchman who deserted after joining the German army.  Fontaine now faces a terrible dilemma.  He must decide whether to take his young cellmate into his confidence or kill him...

Cinema has given us many memorable prison escape dramas - including Hollywood blockbusters such as John Sturges’ The Great Escape (1963) and Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz (1979), and lesser known auteur pieces like Jean Becker’s Le Trou (1960).  The one film in this enduring sub-genre that stands head and shoulders above all the rest is Robert Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (a.k.a. A Man Escaped), a realistic account of a real-life break-out from a German prison in WWII.   The film’s authenticity derives in part from the fact that its director was interned in a Nazi prison camp for his resistance activities at the start of the Occupation, and because Bresson worked closely with André Devigny, whose memoirs the film is based on.  The film was even shot in the very prison from which Devigny escaped.    Here, Bresson extends the pared back approach that he had used on his previous film, Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951), establishing the austere minimalist style which he would employ on all his subsequent films.  Bresson’s rigorous rejection of surface impressions and theatrical artifice allowed him to create a distinctive form of cinematic expression through which he could explore spiritual and metaphysical themes in a highly engaging manner.  Watching a Robert Bresson film is a unique experience, an often arduous but always rewarding pilgrimage across the forbidding landscape of the human soul.

A Man Escaped is far from being your run-of-the-mill prison escape movie.  It has a far deeper spiritual significance, which perhaps only becomes apparent on repeated viewings.  This is a film about faith, not necessarily religious faith, but faith in a more general sense - belief in ourselves, in others, in the inherent value of existence.  Even staunch atheists have to admit that faith is an essential part of the human condition, without which we could hardly exist.  How else would we cope with the fog of uncertainty that surrounds us?  Faith is what we fall back on when we reach the limits of our knowledge, the means by which we navigate through a life of chaos and uncertainty.  The main protagonist in A Man Escaped shows faith in two ways, first in himself, in his ability to pull off a seemingly impossible escape, and then in the trust he must place in the man who is most likely to betray him.  The beauty of Bresson’s film is that it doesn’t limit itself purely to a religious notion of faith.  Faith is what prevents us from being sheep.  Without it, Fontaine would have sat submissively in his cell until he was taken out to be shot.

Whilst the film can be enjoyed purely as an escape movie, it also offers something deeper, a subtle allegory on redemption through faith and perseverance.  By exerting his will and testing his faith to the limit, Fontaine not only liberates himself from his physical prison, he also frees himself from a psychological straitjacket.  Fontaine is obviously someone who is wary of others, perhaps because he has already been betrayed?  His distrust of Jost, an unscrupulous turncoat, is evident throughout their escape.  But he has no choice; unless he puts his faith in the young traitor he will fail.  When Fontaine and Jost cross the final hurdle and secure their hard won freedom, we realise that the former’s faith has been rewarded by a dramatic inner transformation, one that renews his trust in humanity.  It is a similar kind of transcendence, a purification of the soul, to what we see in Bresson’s subsequent Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962).  In both instances, the unfortunate sufferer is redeemed by faith, the spirit triumphs over the flesh.

What makes this film so compelling, so emotionally wrenching, is the way that Bresson compels us to identify with his subject.  We find ourselves locked in the same confined physical and emotional space as the main protagonist, so that when he secures his freedom, we too feel a cathartic surge of release.  Bresson achieves this by drastically limiting both the space in which the film is set and the actions that take place within it.  Most of what we see is confined to Fontaine’s bare-walled cell - the prisoner’s moments of solitary reflection and his meticulous preparations for escape, a rotating cycle of despair and hope.  We are only aware that a world exists outside this cramped bubble of consciousness through sound that comes from without - the sweet sound of a bird song that promises freedom, and the brutal clatter of Nazi footfall that warns of encroaching death.  Bresson uses sound brilliantly in all of his films, but here he is particularly inspired, employing sound as a gateway into the soul of his protagonist.  Few other filmmakers have explored the potentialities of sound, nor used it to greater effect, than Robert Bresson.  Sound stimulates our imagination and our emotions to a far greater extent than the visual image, and therefore offers much greater possibilities for probing the truth that lies beneath the surface.  Sight shows everything but reveals nothing, whilst sound (along with our other three senses, which have not yet been tapped by cinema) reaches us at a far deeper level and can evoke a more vivid reaction.  A good example of this in A Man Escaped is the sudden burst from Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor right at the end of the film.  No image, no fancy camerawork or lighting, could have conveyed the same sense of exultant triumph that swamps Fontaine as he finally walks to freedom.

Bresson’s reliance on sound over image to strike an emotional chord is just one of several techniques that characterise his attempt to get beyond mere surface impressions.  Another is his use of inexperienced actors instead of established professionals.  To Bresson, actors were like clay in the hands of a sculptor, to be moulded to his own design.  This is why he never worked with the same actor twice.  Once the design had been perfected, it could never again be reworked into something else.  By forcing his actors to replay their scenes over and over again, Bresson was able to expunge any trace of surface emotion and what remained was the truth - raw and bloody.  François Leterrier, the lead actor in A Man Escaped, is a supreme example of Bresson’s acteur-modèle, his subdued, almost cadaverous exterior belied by the emotional frenzy that we see within, a frenzy fuelled by a driven instinct for self-preservation.  Leterrier did not pursue a career in acting after this, although he did appear briefly as André Malraux in Alain Resnais’s Stavisky... (1974).  Instead, he turned to film directing.   After a promising filmmaking debut with Les Mauvais coups (1961) and Un roi sans divertissement (1963), Leterrier ended up making lowbrow comedies such as Les Babas Cool (1981) and a fairly risible entry in the Emmanuelle series, Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977).  The sound I now hear is Bresson turning in his grave.

A Man Escaped was an important film for Robert Bresson, his biggest commercial success and the one that was most well-received by the critics.  It won Bresson the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, where he was up against fierce competition from Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Jules Dassin (Celui qui doit mourir) and Federico Fellini (Nights of Cabiria).  Bresson’s most accessible film and possibly his most profound, it seems to acquire an ever greater meaning the more times you watch it.  Whether you consider it a compelling prison break-out movie or a cogent parable on mankind’s struggle to rise above his lowly bestial instincts, A Man Escaped is assuredly a masterpiece of realist expressionism, one of the most meaningful and affecting films you will ever see.

© James Travers 2011

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