if only my mother could see me now
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Bresson (screenwriter and director, based on the memoirs of
André Devigny) Un condamné à mort s’est
échappé ou Le vent soufflé où il veut (A
Man Escaped or: The Wind Blows Where It Likes) / 1956, USA 1957
If there was ever evidence that
Bresson’s films are unlike anyone else’s, one need only watch his A Man Escaped. On the surface this is
one of hundreds of a genre of prison escape movies and part of a smaller genre
of “escape from the Nazis” films. Generally, these pictures center their
interest not only in the methods of the escape but on the incredible adventures
surrounding their heroes’ larger-than-life accomplishments, displaying loud
scores and casts of dozens, while focusing on the startling exploits of those
who achieve the impossible.
Bresson’s black and white film certainly has some of these elements, but
everything is played so absolutely straightforwardly that he almost (purposely)
loses the elements of adventure; he uses music from Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, and his central
actors, instead of being known actors, are, as in most of Bresson’s works,
unknowns, first-time actors chosen from the society around. In this case the
protagonist, Lieutenant Fontaine, is played by a doe-eyed French student
(François Leterrier). We know from the very first image of this film, wherein
the director focuses—as he does in so many of his works—on a prisoner’s nervous
hands as he is being taken away with other prisoners in a car. At each slowdown
or possible street impediment, Fontaine’s left hand quietly reaches for the
door handle (he has evidently been able to free himself from handcuffs), but
after several reaches it appears he has lost his nerve—until the car nears a
tram when the young Fontaine suddenly springs from the moving auto. A car
following behind, quickly recaptures him and he is returned to the prisoner’s
vehicle. Soon after, in retaliation, he is severely beaten, blood flowing from
several facial wounds across his white shirt, an article of clothing he is forced
to wear throughout the rest of the film, appearing as a
Filmed in the original Fort Montluc
prison in Lyon where Devigny, the real-life figure behind this film, was
imprisoned, Bresson’s cinematic immersion in details is far more in evidence
than any dramatic story-telling; but that very focus on Fontaine’s knocks
against the walls, the heft of his lithe body to the high-ceilinged window, his
intense attention to the cell door, and, later, the careful fashioning of metal
and cloth ropes and hooks, in Bresson’s concentration on the utterly material
manifestations, creates perhaps more tension and sense of adventure than were
he to fully invoke, as in a film like Stalag
17, for example, the detailed stratagems of the actual escape. Here
everything is done in secret even as we witness events, which blend in with the
daily activities such as the morning ritual of bathing and emptying slop pails
between whispers and slips of paper messages in and out of pockets. Despite the
constantly prying eyes and the commands for silence of the Nazis, these men
somehow manage to piece together information of each other’s plans and the
conditions of their lives. Similarly, the audience must link up, at times, the
smallest of gestures to be able to comprehend the actions of both the hero and
others. Why are Terry and two other men permitted to walk alone in the open as
they are in the early scenes? Why is the elderly man in the room next door so
unresponsive? Why is Orsini so determined to achieve his early escape? Why are
others so determined to stay where they are? Everything is inexplicable, and in
a world where men are being murdered every day (an opening note tells us more
than 7,000 were put to death in this prison) everyone is possibly a spy or, at
least, someone determined to prevent the punishment all must endure if one of
them were actually to “breach the wall.”
Once Fontaine perceives that the cracks between the heavy wooden panels
of his cell door are hitched together with a softer wood, we observe him,
nearly endlessly, whittling away those connective pieces with the end of a
spoon. But even then, we cannot begin to comprehend how he will, even if he
might wander freely within the prison walls, escape. Orisini’s early
attempt—which ends in his death—reveals moreover, that there are two walls to
be scaled. And, in this sense, he has given his life to possibly save
Fontaine’s.
The more we observe Fontaine at work, however, the more we begin to
perceive that he might never actually make his attempt to escape. Despite
warnings from the others that time is short, Fontaine waits, fashioning yet new
ropes and cables, replacing the door sections he has removed with dyed paper so
that authorities will not notice his destruction of his determent.
If Bresson might ever be said to have been influenced by Kierkegaard, it
is in this work. Clearly, despite his determination, Fontaine does not yet have
the faith to make Kierkegaard’s famous leap into belief, is unwilling to give
himself up entirely to the uncertainty of escape. And it is this “crisis of
faith” that makes Bresson’s prisoner so very different from any other such
figure portrayed. He is a tortured hero who may not live up to our attentions
to him. Despite his intense belief in freedom and his great ability to
manipulate the tools that will help him achieve that freedom, he waits and
waits—almost until it is too late. Called to the German headquarters he is told
that he has been found guilty and will soon be shot.
However, with yet another pillow available, he can braid together even a
longer rope and, at the last moment, reveals his intentions to Jost, who, after
some hesitation, agrees to join him. Together the two work more quickly than he
might have alone, adding to their hooks and ropes yet new links that might help
them in their hour of the escape.
We recognize almost immediately that by putting a young boy in his cell,
Bresson has also introduced a subtle sexual element, and much as he did in Pickpocket,
where the art of stealing billfolds and other objects is equated with the gay
act of cruising. So too, has Orsini also been transformed suddenly into a
potential male lover, his “secret” being suddenly something he will have to
share or destroy the other to keep it quiet.
The intelligent blogger, Brooks Peters of An Open Book expresses
the issues quite lucidly:
“This unspoken language [the
language of “stalking” as in Pickpocket] is also at the heart of A
Man Escaped. For what begins as a simple prison film, of a single man’s
plot to escape, suddenly takes a dramatic turn halfway through when a young
man, a changeling, is dropped into his lap, so to speak. The boy, a satyr-like
waif, Francois Jost, is an enigma. Half Resistance fighter, half German
turncoat, he embodies the duality of Vichy France. A mere 16, he is filthy,
disheveled, and infested with lice, but not enough to be undesirable. Bresson
cleverly cast a handsome young man, Charles le Clainche, without any acting
experience, whose vacant, yearning glances suck you in. It’s a child’s face,
but also a punk’s mask. Could he be a spy? A plant? Or is he like Parsifal, the
“naive fool”? Could he be the condemned man’s soul mate, his brother in arms,
who helps him find the Holy Grail?
We are left wondering, just as the prisoner too wrestles with his
dilemma. Should he trust this mysterious stranger with his deep, dark secret?
Ironically, it is because of the urchin’s lack of artifice that he is embraced,
and accepted. Jost admits to having just a few lice, which surely a Nazi spy
would never do. A liar would never be so fair, so lacking in guile. He’d be all
or nothing, not ingenuous. Jost’s naivete is Fontaine’s ticket to freedom. And
vice-versa. The boy is propositioned. Will you come with me? Or must I kill
you? The youth chooses life.
A partnership is signed, not with a pen, but with a regard, a nod, a
supreme gesture of submission: “Yes.” From there, the pace picks up. The static
quality of the first half of the film is replaced by a state of ramped-up
drama, of action. The rope, made out of sheared bed linens and clothes, serves
as a tightrope, and ultimately as a lifeline.”
The escape itself is also like no other presented on film. Instead of
adventurous and clock-driven swings over the walls, Bresson presents Fontaine’s
and the boy’s escape as a game of cat- and-mouse, a thing of process that is
made up by the two as they go along. Having breached one wall, they wait
several hours before moving forward, in which time Fontaine almost seems to
have lost his will once again, but during which he carefully observes the
patterned movements of the guards, who march just a few steps in one direction
before turning to march in an equal number of steps in the other direction,
revealing, in their regulated militarism, a place just beyond their patrol
where the two might alight.
With careful and quiet maneuvers, the duo slip down the final wall, no
music to accompany them until, as they walk away, free men, into the fog, the
Mozart music is repeated. The young Jost expresses the utter joy of their
achievement. Peters nicely summarizes the first moments of their freedom:
Yet, Bresson cannot resist closing off an expectations we might have a further
expression of passion. The boy blandly responds: “If only my mother could see
me now,” perhaps the most poignant and personal of any response possible.
For Bresson, clearly, it is the truth
of his story that matters, not its exceptionality. That someone did actually escape tells us everything
we need to know about the human spirit and its possible survival. Leave love to
the dreamers.
Los Angeles, April 1, 2013
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2013).
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