A Man Escaped (1956) review
A man stuck.
Oh, the tedium of pretense… Bresson's idea of cinema is guilty of a common mistake in aesthetics: to think in terms of a sharp antagonism between art and entertainment. Some seem to think that to please an audience is to become cheap already, a sellout, as if art, "real" art, had necessarily to disturb, provoke, express, unveil new social and political forms. The artist must be, thus, either some kind of prophet or some kind of revolutionary, always one step ahead of the rest of us. The work of art as presage or rebellion, vanguard or protest.
But what if people don't like that kind of thing? What if they prefer, say, a naughty comedy? Then it's either because “they know not what they do”, nourished that they were on the garbage of so-called culture industry (which might be, indeed, true); or, maybe, they're just not enlightened enough, and “real” art will always be hopelessly exclusive. The first answer is common among Marxists and social thinkers; the second is more usual among the vanguards, the "art pour l'art" types, an aristocratic conception which takes art as a substitute to religion, that is, as an ultimate source of meaning. (For instance, Nietzsche’s notion of an aesthetic justification of existence or Stendhal who thought art was a promise of happiness).
Both these outlooks intersect, of course, and both tend to degenerate into elitism. Adorno, one of the best minds of the 20th century, famously despised jazz, cinema and everything “popular”, championing, instead, an extremely niched form of art, namely, atonal music (Schoenberg, Webern). Now, all’s well that ends well, and some elitism might be commendable in times of Tik Tok. It might even be aesthetically inescapable.
However, aesthetic elitism has a persistent Achilles' heel: tediousness. And often we have a case of a pretentious work which aims at greatness by attempting to do the exact opposite of what successful commercial art does. And since successful commercial art is often thrilling, then boredom and torpor must be allies. Instead of writing a pulpy novel with lots of crime and sex, the real novelist ought to experiment with the form in Joycean fashion; instead of a typical crime thriller, the real filmmaker ought to be counterintuitively prosaic, “sensitive”, etc. And so reading a novel feels like deciphering hieroglyphs (Finnegans Wake), and watching a movie feels like watching paint dry (Jeanne Dielman).
So is with Bresson. Apart from Au Hasard Balthazar and Diary of a Country Priest, which, though insistently monotonous, overcome their faults through cathartic Christian motives, Bresson’s films are like dissonant lullabies: they can’t even provide some couch slumber for they irritate the viewer. So is with A Man Escaped (1956).
A crafty film, sure, by a crafty filmmaker. He knows his stuff and, thus, knows what he will not do. Roger Ebert aptly, though laudatorily, describes the Bresson style:
“In his films there are no ‘beauty shots’. No effects. No emphasis on the physical appearances of the actors. No fancy zooms or other shots that call attention. He uses the basic vocabulary of long, medium, close and insert shots, to tell what needs to be told about every scene. No shock cutaways. Reality-based, calm editing.” (Read Ebert’s full review https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-a-man-escaped-1956)
Yet the film is hollow, unlike Au Hasard Balthazar and Diary of a Country Priest which tell a story (and a devastating one at that). It’s but an attempt at “pure cinema”–– unsuccessful, since the tedious narration ruins even that. The film drags on and on and on… A slow, prosaic approach is something; teasing us with an insupportable infinity is a whole different thing, just short of a crime. In the course of the film, the viewer is constantly conquered by a peculiar kind of irrational fright: “perhaps this will never end”… And then that guy starts narrating again…
Who’s the guy, the hero? A French Resistance member (as Bresson himself was), condemned to death in a prison in Nazi-occupied France. He has to escape or die. There’s such a degree of inaction that we actually consider rooting for the nazis to get this over with already. But they don’t, and the man… escaped, as the title indicated from the get-go. At least it’s logical. The film is about how he goes about his escaping, scrutinizing every detail. It ends up being but a glorified get-out-of-jail flic, so static and dull that checking one’s phone while watching it is neither impolite nor mindless (as it is, as a rule), but a necessary… escape! We want to escape this film more than that guy wants to escape prison. Perhaps that was the idea: to feel like we’re in jail. Well, gimme a book then, jailor.
Why didn’t Bresson shoot A Man Escaped as a silent picture? Then, perhaps, it’d work. If he had used surrounding sound only, instead of testing our patience with that narration, then the film would have been coherent to its minimalist aesthetics. But Bresson refrained from it, as if he knew, deep inside, that without some distractions he would have been caught with his pants down–– he had nothing.
