Critics reviews

[Fontaine isn't] given much background--we don't know where he comes from, the nature of his role, his family life, or the obstacles he'll face beyond the prison walls. We know him and we judge him only by his actions, and that is enough. What appears on camera is significant. What does not is not. Every detail is deliberate and revelatory. A MAN ESCAPED is Bresson at his best--the perfect marriage of form and content.

A Man Escaped is so absorbing because Bresson's traditional methods of de-emphasis imbue the film with an almost maddening tension. The prisoner's panic and desperation is felt, but rarely seen. We can barely read Fontaine's emotions because he can't afford to allow them to distract from the task at hand, and so the details of Fontaine's preparation for escape come to be imbued with a pregnant, repressed urgency as well as an ironic beauty...

Of all of Bresson's films, A Man Escaped should be required viewing for all film students, as examples of economy, simplicity, and striking proof of the power of images to convey ideas, emotions and faith. As with all of his films, Bresson in A Man Escaped strips away all that is unnecessary, concentrating on the essence of the title character's struggle to escape from a military prison, creating a world of perpetual unease and unceasing struggle.

Although rigorously committed to precise narrative delineation and wasteless editing, Bresson's style is utterly alien to the way films are usually made, to the point that, as a colleague noted, he rebuilds the world with each edit. A Man Escaped, with a spoiler in its very title, is the axiomatic Bresson film, in that it's about what it's about (an imprisoned man escapes), but, at the same time, rises above its earthly architecture, in each moment conveying what's within—and what's outside.

That the closest thing to a melodramatic moral quandary---involving a cellmate (Le Clainche) who may be a snitch and is definitely a dead ringer for Dennis the Menace---doesn't rock the aesthetic boat speaks volumes about Bresson's commitment to achieving what would later be termed an "ecstatic truth" by peeling everything away. Sparseness can be rich beyond belief; the proof is now unspooling before your very eyes.

The risks taken in A Man Escaped — ordinary in themselves, but extraordinary in conjunction — are the same risks which characterize the whole esprit of Bresson's œuvre. The risk, namely, of opting for counter-intuitive narrative techniques when more conventional ones present themselves.

The films of Robert Bresson are proof of the limitations of conventional language--they leave us tongue-tied and dumbfounded.

Based on a French lieutenant's account of his 1942 escape from a gestapo fortress in Lyon, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of Robert Bresson, one of the cinema's foremost artists... The best of all prison-escape movies, it reconstructs the very notion of freedom through offscreen sounds and defines salvation in terms of painstakingly patient and meticulous effort.

What a world of emotion is implied in a single word when Fontaine helps Jost down the wall and hugs him, lovingly saying his name: "Jost." The final image of the two marching determinedly in bare feet away from the prison into the foggy night is one of cinema's most satisfying.

Chiseling and scraping, devising and communicating, Fontaine fights against his fate (the French title translates more accurately as One Condemned to Death Has Escaped) and restores hope in those around him. A perfectly realized and quietly burning film, Bresson's fourth feature film is not only one of his greatest artistic achievements, but one of his most popular and accessible films as well. It's an excellent entry point into the work of a master.

Throughout the film, sound has many important functions. As in all of his films, Bresson emphasizes the sound track, rightly believing that sound may be just as cinematic as images. At certain points in A Man Escaped, Bresson even lets his sound technique dominate the image; throughout the film, we are compelled to listen. Indeed, Bresson is one of a handful of directors who create a complete interplay between sound and image.

Leterrier is one of the great vindications of Bresson's preference for untrained actors. The matter-of-fact expression that he brings to nearly every shot in the film bespeaks the character's unostentatious resolve, but it also bears a certain aura of Mona Lisa-like mystery and ambiguity. It is credibly the mask of a committed partisan at the same time that it is a face sufficiently ordinary to give no ready-made clue to the potential for heroism.