Much has been made of the faith-apparatus that drives many of the film’s tenets. Bresson is rightfully singled out as a director of a profound religious sensibility, and more specifically of an interest in Christian theology, so A Man Escaped undeniably serves as a fable of religious dimension. First of all, there is the question of the film’s subtitle, Le vent souffle où il veut (“The wind blows where it wills”), quoted from the Book of John (3:8), in which Jesus instructs Nicodemus on the manner in which a man can be “born again”:

Nicodemus saith unto him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Jesus answered, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ‘ye must be born again.’ The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

Following our comprehension of Fontaine’s dual consciousness, we may propose an analogy by comparing Jesus’ distinction of the flesh-body from the spirit-body, to the body-in-kinema counterpointed by the self-in-thought in A Man Escaped. If Fontaine resigns himself to his cinema-flesh, then the scenario will end, as the plaque at the beginning of the film reminds us, in the death and oblivion of a numberless people; if, however, Fontaine is ingested by the “spirit,” which comes and goes as it may, then he will find the keys to the “kingdom of God”; in cinematic terms, Fontaine will evade the mortality of history and scenario via kinetic revelation — Fontaine, whose celluloid flesh is meant to die with the grim scenario of history, will be reborn as a living embodiment of the survivor, the believer, as the actual André Devigny, the indefatigable hero who found his faith in a spoon.

Fontaine’s working theology is mechanistic and pragmatic, and his sense of freedom is a very real location that can only be realized through tactile means.

That Fontaine’s key to freedom assumes the shape of a stolen metal spoon that he scrapes down to a chisel — which in turn leads to his discovery of the cell door’s anatomy and dismantlement, and so forth — is a material fact that honors the severe minimalist attention to detail which embodies the film’s philosophical praxis. Fontaine’s working theology is mechanistic and pragmatic, and his sense of freedom is a very real location that can only be realized through tactile means. During the terse conversation scenes where he and the other prisoners are allowed to bathe their faces, hands and neck, Fontaine establishes a friendship with a priest, with whom he shares his plans for freedom. The priest laments that he had not taken a Bible with him when he was arrested by the Nazis, and Fontaine offers him his pencil as consolation (“I don’t have a Bible but I do have a pencil”). This response conjures up the intrinsic difference between the priest’s and Fontaine’s conceptions of faith: the former’s hope rests in prayer and contemplation, whereas the latter’s is more pragmatic — Fontaine’s “gospel” consists in writing it — in actualizing it — as opposed to reading it. Another scene repeats the dialectic: the priest announces he has fortunately come into possession of a Bible, and right behind him, Fontaine, noticing an unregarded spoon, whispers to himself, “I am lucky too,” and takes the new spoon to replace a broken one. Bresson makes the dialectic between the two faiths most obvious in a third scene where the priest advises Fontaine to “read and pray. God will save you.” To which Fontaine replies, “He’ll only save us if we give him a hand. It would be too easy if God took care of everything.” This type of theology insists that grace must be supported by acts of faith for it to be operational in the human spirit (Catholic dogma establishes that actual grace does not eliminate the actions of free will nor presuppose the absence thereof), and Fontaine’s faith-system, while not contradicting the priest’s contemplative mode, goes further to make an art of its instruments. This artistry of the instruments of faith may stand as a representation of Bresson’s personal theology and art-practice.