A Man Escaped
by Robert Bresson
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charles Le Clainche, Fran?ois Leterrier, Jacques Ertaud, Maurice Beerblock, Roland MonodDirector: Robert Bresson
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-25
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Yorker Video
Movie Reviews of A Man Escaped
Movie Review: Redundant but well worth seeing
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Summary of A Man Escaped
"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 AxmakerArt House & International DVD Video
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