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Robert Bresson: Man Escaped
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Even when he was not working in a religious setting, Bresson was noted for his strengths in depicting the rituals of everyday life. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, for example, focused at length on the rhythms of prison life. When he did return to religious themes in his 1962 film Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc), Bresson succeeded in putting a wholly new face on a story that French viewers and many other audiences knew well. The torture and burning at the stake of the fifteenth-century heretic and military leader Joan of Arc were shown mostly through indirect details, such as a dog agitated by the smell of burning human flesh. Much of the film is based on the actual transcripts of Joan's trial. Whereas other directors treated Joan's story in epic terms, Bresson's film lasted only a little over an hour and dwelt on the feelings of the saint herself.
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Bresson's most famous, and to some his best, film is A Man Escaped (1956). Like its hero, Fontaine (François Leterrier), Bresson spent time as a prisoner of war, and this may account for some of the film's intensity. The director's sometimes maddening methods — omitting important plot points, disorienting the viewer with shots of body parts — have brought charges of a lack of suspense, and a look at the script alone might support this. But Bresson gets enormous tension out of the excruciating details of confinement and attempted escape. The mounting effect of these details — Fontaine's methodical unraveling and reworking of clothing into ropes and mattress springs into hooks, the pitiless marches through the prison yard — creates a virtual dream state and a sense of anxiety in the viewer because, in spite of the detail and the film's title, it's not clear Fontaine will escape. Less noticed by most critics is the sweet, almost homoerotic bonding between Fontaine and his 16-year-old cellmate and Christlike redeemer, Jost.
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After his return to Paris, Bresson's film career began in earnest. His 1943 film Les anges du péché (The Angels of the Streets) was set among a group of Dominican nuns, one of whom goes to extreme lengths to try to save the soul of a hardened female criminal. Les anges du péché featured a screenplay by French playwright Jean Giraudoux. Although the film did not quite have the pure simplicity of Bresson's later masterpieces - it used trained actors, for example, rather than the nonprofessionals Bresson, in the manner of a painter, liked to call models - it became a commercial success and established Bresson as a major talent.
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Bresson was admired by filmmakers all over the world, but he himself hated commercial cinema. He never used established movie stars, and always directed his actors to use great restraint. As a viewer, it was said that he hadn't made it to the end of a movie for the last three or four decades, though he did admire some films, like Chaplin's City Lights (1931). Yet he was a passionate, sensitive man and a great artist. He published a book, Notes on the Cinematographer (thankfully still in print), that outlines his directorial guidelines (he considered himself not a "director" but a "cinematographer"). Roger Ebert has said that anyone who seriously loves cinema will eventually find their way to Robert Bresson.
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Bresson was originally a painter, and as is clear from his movies, a man of great erudition. He was ... one to whom questions of how one should behave were of extreme importance, while also, in a mystery like those spiritual ones his films evoke, believing, as a Jansenist Catholic, that life is comprised exclusively of predestination and chance. His unique approach to filmmaking developed as a combination of his sophisticated understanding of aesthetics and his preoccupation with the way things are on the deepest level. He dispensed with all techniques that weren't faithful to film exclusively; and as a worshiper of God he showed again and again how we are all helpless in the mesh and meshings of a reality that made us and how, as painful or mundane as it can be, the beauty of this, or at least the beauty of acknowledging it, is continuous and eternal.
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Some view the religious dimension of the first half of Bresson's career as the reason for his insularity, his stubborn refusal, in their eyes, to address contemporary social realities. This made him the target of criticism from leftist French periodicals, such as Positif, and marginalized his work for many American critics who preferred more politically engaged filmmakers. The Devil Probably (1977) was judged as more of a disillusioned critique of the world's vanities than a scrutiny of specific ideologies or institutions. Indeed, the film's mockery of all ‘solutions' to personal and social ills—whether religious, political, or psychoanalytic—affirms a rather global, apolitical pessimism, symbolized by the youthful protagonist's hiring of someone to kill him as a gesture of protest against society. In its hard, uncompromising look at the world, then, Bresson's later work courted neither the left nor the right and appeased no one.
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Man Escaped