CerebralDebris

Last night, Charlotte and I frenched it up frenchtacularly. We started out by hitting up Steak Frites, a French bistro on 7th Ave and Varick St, just above Houston St. There we had frisee avec lardons et roquefort, and some delicious beer (admittedly not French). We followed that up by taking in a showing of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (French Title: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut) at the Film Forum, which is currently running a whole bunch of French films centering around crime, imprisonment, and other noir-ish subjects.

Originally released in 1956, the film still holds up quite well today. It’s based on the true story of a prison escapee – here called Fontaine – and set almost entirely in his cell, and the washroom where he and his fellow prisoners are taken once a day. The film is 90% english-subtitled French, with some non-subtitled German spoken by the guards. Both the dialog and the narration are sparse, and a lot of what characters are thinking is left to be discerned from watching the actors’ faces and body movements.

There’s some standard “old movie” goofiness – bad sound effects, some overacting here and there, but by and large it’s a very solid film. You can feel yourself getting tense as Fontaine’s plans for escape come slowly together, even as the Germans are preparing to execute him. The last-minute arrival of a young French boy who had been in the German army throws a wrench into the works for Fontaine, but the boy ultimately proves a vital piece of the quest.

There were two things that stood out about the film for me, both very positive: for one, since this was a 1950′s movie, the director isn’t obsessed with modern jump-cuts, stutter cams and the like. Most shots are long and unmoving, giving you real time to see the actors’ faces and eyes. The second thing I enjoyed was the lack of a score, other than at the very beginning and very end of the movie. This lent a lot of importance to the sound effects, making the footsteps of an approaching guard or the loud ratcheting of a lock that much more significant. As the end finally approaches, the tension that these two things have helped to build really matters, especially as the protagonist is faced with a series of agonizing choices that sometimes bring him to near-paralysis.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. As both a prison movie and an early example of post-WW2 films about the war, I recommend it.