Narrow angles. Un – or rather – under spoken tensions. Laborious in its most sincere moments with a palpable detest for the sensational. A Man Escaped is often stated as Bresson’s finest hour, but it also takes what is characteristic of him and amplifies it with a purpose that is driven by a need for contrast. As we sit and watch Fontaine wrap cut cloth over a rope, there’s a mechanical speed with which he proceeds. Bresson’s obsession in showing us these moments would lead one to believe that he would wish for us to see that at every step, a man’s doubt manifests itself. Perhaps, a tingle betrays it, but to our eyes there is none. Doubt, or even an existential question, doesn’t cross a man as he paces his motions in life. For Bresson, it finds itself at the intervals of these motions. Though hook and rope are made to be ready, we must see doubt and its various appearances not in their creation, but in the long hours of decision that precede it. In his world, mounting and breaking doubts move the lives of his characters, and all else in between – however long – is only in service of these formative moments.
What Bresson may or may not say about this over-reading of his world-view, I do not know. What I do know is what I’ve watched; a film that hardly is one, yet mists reality with a thin sheet of implications like any art form. Mozart is invited, but he is never given the front seat. In the deafening dumbness, the only noises we hear are Fontaine and his chipping. He chips the door while his trust chips away at him. In the unhealthy milieu of a German prison, the only habit that isn’t routinized is the endowment of trust. There are fathers, there are scoundrels; some form bonds, but distrust has its dominion. Bresson vacuums all the inordinacies out of his presentation and goes as far as mentioning his unassuming treatment of the subject before we are allowed to see it. The result is an unmitigated display of the worst seeds of estrangement, dragged out like a dog from its manger. Rarely do I wish for the projector to re-spool the tapes, but with A Man Escaped, I sincerely wished I could watch it over and over again before I had to get up from my seat. It ineluctably descends on you, without airs and graces, but makes you observe the workings of life itself.
When I watched Pickpocket a year ago, I’d recognized the scaffoldings of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but the film was uniquely Bresson. He was still less ascetic than he is in L’Argent, but the exalting flourishes of Dostoevsky never translate to Bresson’s work. There is always a restraint that mirrors his outlook on art. But, more recently, what I’d realized was the parallelisms between the approach of Camus, in his works such as The Stranger and The Plague, and Bresson’s visual language. It’s as if the former’s prose and conciseness are married to the extremes of Russian literature, made possible by the asperity of Bresson’s world-view. Fontaine’s tribulations are the tribulations of the world, but the detachment with which he is observed is precisely that of Camus in The Plague; he isn’t made to be a hero. He struggles like others, and as his neighbour points out, Orsini had to die for him to succeed. He is fortunate and his rebellion is only natural, not an exclusivity.
Fontaine is much like Bresson’s other characteristic male leads – swanky, gifted with slitted but heavy eyes, and a pallor that conceals emotions. But he differs from Targe in L’Argent and Michel in Pickpocket. Fontaine has direction and he doesn’t waver from what he wants – one can see this in his eyes from the first shot of the film, eyeing closely the door-lever of the car. But, when one sees this, or as one continues to see this short recollection, the urgency or perseverance to escape is never in question. Fontaine’s enemy is engendered through imprisonment, and we see this battle take place beneath the actual battle. It is unspoken but burningly visible – a feat that is emblematic of Bresson – and you see it in every moment of relent. Fontaine’s conflict is even worse than those of Targe and Michel because, for those two, the conflict within always spills outside. If Bresson were asked, and he was asked at Cannes for L’Argent, he would say that Targe – and possibly Michel too – communicate in the wrong sense. Unaware of what they want from themselves and the world, they play a game of hook-and-sink with those they brush shoulders with. But Fontaine is devoid of communication and as a result, he’s caught in the dilemma – should he or should he not kill Jost? When he chooses to escape with him, it isn’t until they finally embrace do we realize that the right way of communication for Bresson is through the truth. What truth? One can never say with Bresson; it could be the truth of newfound trust, or it could be the truth of acceptance.
The way Bresson operates lends much to his frills-less film-making style. François Leterrier who plays Fontaine was hand-picked out of the Sorbonne; a choice which is alien to the world of cinéma but not to his world of the cinématographe. This distinction is better discussed alongside L’Argent, so I shall reserve this for later. But this vehemency in choice is perhaps Bresson’s greatest asset; what happened due to circumstances for others, he makes happen through choice. It lends a spontaneity that actors do not allow to breach into them. For cinema that needs a layer of projection, you turn to actors. For what Bresson is trying to achieve, you need a set of individuals without a contrived arsenal of emotions to appear on camera. To know what to do through the script is different, but to think constantly about what one needs to do is precisely what Bresson wishes to eliminate. He doesn’t show the previous day’s rushes to his models or conduits (the term actor is not apposite for their unaltered personas) and they are to display themselves on screen, priming their personas to react against an utterance or sound. It’s a theory that has been practised to sever motion pictures from theatricality and no one has done more to distinguish cinema than Bresson. When Fontaine scrapes at his door and pulls back, sound and image are in asynchronous yet parallel motion. We don’t see him when he’s at work, but when the footsteps are nigh, he staggers back to bed, and we see him gazing at the peephole with a gripped fear. It’s almost as if the sound drops off for the image to continue with the baton of emotion.
A Man Escaped is perhaps Bresson’s only film that reached widespread reception and spoke to many people in a way that his other films didn’t. One could chalk it up to the subject and its universal appeal. Stories of liberation and perseverance have a sheen that speaks to people regardless of the approach. Shawshank Redemption would be the most likely comparison made but I think the two films speak of two different things. Yes, Andy feels liberated after crawling through acre-long sewers, but that film was more about the relationships formed through prison and the incompatibility one suffers with society after release. Bresson is more tight-fisted in his display; there are conversations and there seem to be relationships, but they are ultimately circumscribed by the general malaise of distrust.
Bresson is unique because he tries to replace the construct of cinema, more specifically by dissociating its theatrical origins. He wishes to achieve something more with the camera and the element of time to better understand humans and it’s a hard task, to sum up, what one is not usually accustomed to seeing. A Man Escaped is perhaps the most accessible of all his works, and if one were to watch Bresson, it’s ideal that one starts from here.
(Post revised on 21/01/2023)
