Un condamné à mort s'est échappé 1956

Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, known in English as A Man Escaped, is Robert Bresson's 1956 film about a French Resistance fighter held by the Germans in Montluc prison in Lyon in 1943, and the patient work by which he prepares his escape. The title tells you how it ends. The suspense comes from the process: a spoon sharpened into a chisel, the planks of a cell door loosened over weeks, bedding and wire twisted into ropes. Bresson used non-professional actors, a calm voice-over and very little music, and the result is one of the most gripping prison films ever made. It was based on the escape of André Devigny, a real member of the Resistance, and won Bresson the prize for best director at Cannes in 1957.

The story

Lieutenant Fontaine is arrested and driven to Montluc. On the way he tries to jump from the car and is beaten. In his cell he finds that the door is made of wooden boards held together by a frame. With a spoon, worked against the stone floor until it has an edge, he starts to work the boards loose.

Around him are other prisoners he can barely see: a neighbour he talks to by tapping on the wall, an older man in the next cell who has given up hope, a Protestant pastor who lends him a Bible, men he passes in the washroom. One prisoner, Orsini, tries a hasty escape and is caught. Fontaine learns from it. He is sentenced to death. Then a teenage prisoner, Jost, is put in his cell, and he must decide whether this boy is a spy or a companion.

Bresson's method

Bresson did not like the word "actor". He called his performers models and asked them to speak flatly and avoid expression. François Leterrier, who plays Fontaine, was a philosophy student at the time and later became a director himself.

The camera stays close: on hands, tools, the grain of wood, the pane of a door. The sound matters as much as the image: footsteps in the corridor, the scrape of the spoon, a train passing in the distance, keys. Fragments of Mozart's Mass in C minor come in at a few chosen moments and give these daily rituals an almost religious weight.

Faith and chance

The French subtitle, Le vent souffle où il veut ("The wind blows where it wishes"), is from the Gospel of John. Bresson was a Catholic with an austere sense of grace, and the film can be read as a story about how human effort and something beyond it work together. You do not need to share that faith to feel it. On the most practical level, the film is about persistence, and about the risk of trusting another person.

Where to start with Bresson

This is the most accessible of Bresson's films, and the best place to begin. His later works, such as Pickpocket (1959) and Au hasard Balthazar (1966), push the same style further and divide audiences more.

Fans of prison escapes should also see Jacques Becker's Le Trou (1960), made a few years later in a similar spirit, and Renoir's La Grande Illusion, which shows prisoners of an earlier war. More films of the period are in the best French films of the 1950s and the best French war films.