Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut

Robert Bresson (1956)

According to the tense used in the title, the escape could be the starting point of the story – in fact, it’s what happens finally.  Based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a soldier and member of the French Resistance, Robert Bresson’s film describes in close detail the meticulous planning by a prisoner of war of an escape from Montluc prison in Lyon.  (Montluc was where André Devigny was held and where, as Bresson reminds us before the opening credits, more than seven thousand men died at the hands of the Nazis.)  Lieutenant Fontaine, as Devigny has been renamed, is determined from a very early stage to escape:  he tries to leap from the car transporting him, along with a more securely handcuffed companion, to Montluc.  Fontaine learns about halfway through A Man Escaped, by which point his getaway plan is already well advanced, that the Germans’ investigation of his activities has been completed and that his sentence is death.

The BFI programme note included a piece about the film by David Thomson (for The Independent in 2002).  Thomson wrote that:

‘… Bresson saw how by the 1950s, actors and stars were smothering film – for they told us what to expect.  They began to stop us looking and feeling.  So [Fontaine] is a novice [actor], François Leterrier …’

Philip Kemp, in his better than usual introduction at BFI, reiterated this preference for using non-actors and the reasons for it.  Yet Bresson doesn’t, in spite of the unyielding, concentrated style of A Man Escaped, stint on explanatory voiceover:  he has Fontaine tell the audience explicitly both what he is doing, by way of preparations for escape, and what he is thinking or feeling:  the former is always shown on screen too (although the oral explanation is welcome for someone as practically clueless as me); the latter seems to conflict with Bresson’s determination to make the audience work hard.  What’s more, when Fontaine and his fellow prisoners exchange secret conversation and messages in the prison washroom where several scenes take place, the non-professional cast aren’t above acting confidential – they sidle up to one another or, as they impart information, incline their heads in a way that might seem designed to attract the notice of their (mostly unseen) captors.  I can’t help taking what Bresson said he felt about actors with a generous pinch of salt.  If he really didn’t want his performers to spoonfeed the viewer, perhaps he saw the inexpressive Anne Wiazemsky in Au hasard Balthazar as the ideal exponent of his film-making philosophy; but Claude Laydu in Diary of a Country Priest and François Leterrier here strike a happier medium between artlessness and artificiality.

What works so well in A Man Escaped is the counterpoise of François Leterrier’s appearance and Fontaine’s personality.  With his open, dignified face and, especially, his large, alert but melancholy eyes, Leterrier suggests someone ready to be long-suffering (he would look right with a beard and a crown of thorns).  Yet other prisoners, who appear more vital and aggressive, lack Fontaine’s appetite for risking his life by escaping – except for one, Orsini (Jacques Ertaud), who tries and fails, and is shot by firing squad.  The second alternative in the film’s French title quotes St John’s Gospel (3:8):

‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’

Another alternative title which Bresson considered, according to Philip Kemp, was ‘Aide-toi’, referring to the French equivalent of ‘God helps those who help themselves’.   As he makes clear in one of his theological debates with a fellow prisoner who is ordained (Roland Monod), Fontaine believes that God will need the assistance of human will to make the escape happen.

Although I often found it uninvolving, it’s hard not to admire A Man Escaped and how Bresson’s sustained self-discipline fuses with Fontaine’s.  The visual purity of the images (the black-and-white photography is by Léonce-Henri Burel) gives the film, in spite of its grim setting, a considerable beauty.  Sounds are no less important – the running water in the washroom, the various nocturnal noises in evidence when Fontaine eventually makes his move, accompanied by the younger Jost (Charles Le Clainche), who has recently become his cellmate.  Most remarkable is the utterly different quality of the sound that the two men experience as soon as they reach the other side of the prison wall.  Bresson uses Mozart (the Kyrie from the Great Mass in C minor, K. 427) sparingly – but enough to ensure that the music reinforces the impact of particularly important moments.  (The English subtitling wasn’t always great.  Example:  Fontaine’s ‘Jost was trembling.  Perhaps I was too’ is translated merely as ‘We were trembling’.)

1 September 2014