A Man Escaped, Bresson’s fourth film, is considered the second installment in an unofficial trilogy of films by Bresson that rely heavily on voice-over narrative. The first film in this trilogy is Diary of a Country Priest, and the third is Pickpocket, both of which could also stand as exponents of a peculiar and masterful refinement. The narrative structure of A Man Escaped is no more complicated than its title suggests, in French, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (“One Condemned to Death Has Escaped”). The title says it all: a French Resistance lieutenant named Fontaine is captured and brought to a prison camp in Lyon, where he awaits near-certain death at the hands of the Nazis. As the days build up, Fontaine, unrelenting in his desire to escape, devises a prison-break scheme that miraculously proves successful. On paper, the film lacks sophistication. The basic circumference of the story, which never strays beyond the immediate reality of the hero, from the moment he is imprisoned until his clandestine departure, is adapted from a memoir by André Devigny, a Resistance fighter and World War II survivor on whom the character Fontaine is modeled. The storyboard complexities and peripheral “historical” material that typify a Hollywood production of the same plot would have given us a longer film of exaggerated pathos, multiple side characters, and a prevailing obsession over the grandiose gesture. Bresson instinctively (or, should we say, against conventional instinct) decides rather to obsess over the grandly minute, the obscurely serendipitous, the infinitely tangible.

François Leterrier as Fontaine
Un condamné à mort s'est échappé
(A Man Escaped)
DIRECTED BY Robert Bresson
(© Gaumont, 1956)

The simplicity of the title embodies the film’s philosophical significance: the man who is condemned to death has already escaped, has utterly broken free, from the penal colony. In other words, we know already that Fontaine will break free, even when we see, from the first scene, that he is apprehended and being escorted by the faceless villains, the Nazis and French collaborators. The suspense of the story (its kinema function, its ploy of mobility) is meant to emerge like an unseen gas from another sector, from the very soil of the physical setting as opposed from the structural grain of the plot — as a process of natural, perhaps anomalous, growth. Fontaine’s story, which is emphatically introduced in medias res, in the very presence of its unfolding, takes place in the present state of things as a discourse of unseen trajectory (unseen by him and by those who surround him in the fictional space of the film). What is a process of fiction/fictionalizing for Fontaine, the owner of his destiny, is a matter of nonfiction for us. We are gazing at him through the lens of the historical (we know this story to be true, to have happened, in the past), while he, on the other hand, is performing for us from the perspective of a craftsman at work; a man given charge over the tools of his liberty — emphatically in the present-tense. I do not mean to imply that Fontaine is aware of the spectator, or that Bresson institutes a meta-cinematic approach to the telling of a true story; only that, as we swiftly learn, Fontaine’s consciousness plays on a separate track from what his body-in-kinema performs. When Fontaine speaks to himself, he is speaking to us, implicitly, as the witnesses of an organic mechanism at work in a simultaneously historical/fictional unfolding.