Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 44/52 | 1950s
The following is a true story. I present it as it happened, without adornment. — Robert Bresson
At this site, under German occupation, 10,000 men suffered victims of the Nazis. Seven thousand passed away. — A plaque outside Montluc prison in Lyon
Lyon, 1943 A hand sneaks to the handle of a car door but pulls back. The man, Fontaine, sits, his hands unshackled, next to two men, handcuffed together. The free man looks for his opportunity. When the car stops, he jumps out of the vehicle. A German car full of soldiers followed them, so they apprehended Fontaine and cuffed him at once. They also bash him over the head with the butt of their pistol. They throw the bloodied man into a jail cell at Montluc.
Fontaine finds a way to climb up to the window, where he can communicate with Terry, who is a member of a small, unsupervised group outside. Terry throws Fontaine some twine, and the two begin regular exchanges of letters and goods. Among them is a safety pin, allowing Fontaine to remove his cuffs when unsupervised. The warden brings Fontaine to him, demanding a promise that he will not try to escape again.
Outside, the sound of bullets reminds Fontaine that the prison executes inmates. The prisoners walking outside move, unphased by the inconsistent ricochet. Fontaine determines that he will escape at the first opportunity he gets. His plan grows more complex when the Germans move him to the top floor of the prison.
Bresson further refines the aesthetic goals he began exploring in Diary of a Country Priest. He uses non-actors, concerned with the artificiality of acting under the intense scrutiny of the camera lens. When he hired actors, he first looked for models of “innocence,” a concept Antonioni would expand on in the following decade.
In this, Bresson chases the aspects of film that make it distinct from all other media—the framing and duration of the film tied to the creation of space, that time can capture what a single image cannot. Words capture character, but their actions throughout define them, however abstract.
Now, all of this is nothing without pacing and intuition—otherwise, you may as well set up a surveillance camera. The edits wish to give us as much information as we need and not an iota more. Of course, in 2025, our sense of fast pace is quite different from 1956 Bresson’s.
Still, we see the desire for efficiency in how Bresson removes in-between frames of actions to shorten them and render the scene tighter. However, the use of narration, while sparse for its time, still weighs heavily on the film.
This film is one of Kieślowski’s favorites—the sparseness of The Decalogue wears this movie’s influence. Like Kieślowski, this movie may bore many audience members. But for those for whom this movie does not feel like a homework assignment, it instead will feel like a lesson in filmmaking that will inform every film they watch going forward.