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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The art of repetition, 20 Jan 2005
Many have discovered this film and likened it to an emotional journey that manages to entrap the audience with a beautiful depiction of humanity. Though, to an extent, this is true, I think there is much more to the picture than that. I mean, this certainly isn't the Shawshank Redemption! No, this is a very clinical film, structured and calculated so that every shot and every cut gets a response out of the viewer. In a way, it's technique of manipulation isn't that far removed from Hollywood... though Bresson has little interest in invoking mawkish sentiment or bringing the violins in for that all important Oscar clip. Instead, his goal is to put the audience right into the story, so that every day seems to unfold in real time and we can really feel the depression, claustrophobia and ever-decreasing sense of hope swell within our stomachs. Now, some might see this as dull or depressing, but far from it. Bresson is a poet and his films are always about ultimate transcendence. He is aware, that by making the audience share the pain and alienation of the characters, they will ultimately share their elation come those closing scenes.Therefore, the art here is in submerging ourselves in the notion of escape and the foreshadowing of the events that make the eventual escape possible, so that the act of watching the film becomes a process similar to following a book, with the constant fades to black acting as chapter points, which gives the film an episodic quality that removes the notion of time from the protagonist's mind and in turn, removes it from ours. Bresson pushes this with his use of point of view camera perspectives, isolated framing & punchy editing in moments of crisis so that we become the character and observe the prison and pick out the clues that will possibly aid our escape... which is, of course, an interesting experiment in the limitations of film and the duality that can be created between the picture and the audience. However, here lies the problem. The lack of tension created by the afore-knowledge that the protagonist will in fact escape (and I'm not spoiling anything here, as it's stated in the title) becomes a great hindrance when Bresson's experiments begin to lag, making it harder for us to care about the character as the film reaches the halfway mark. I do admire the filmmaker for taking this risk, giving us a story that is more about 'WHY?' as opposed to 'How?' but ultimately the experiment doesn't quite pay off. This doesn't necessarily mean that the film is without merit though, as the first hour of the film manages to involve us in the intricate and subtle characteristics of the prison and the detainees that dwell there, whilst the director's use of cinematography, montage, editing, music and design are all great and add a definite character to what could have been a very clichéd and moralising film. The drop in narrative interest is enough to demote the film in terms of star-rating, but this is still certainly worth checking out, offering us, as it does, a strong concept based on fact, some impeccable and unglamorous performances that, if it were not for Bresson's use of mise-en-scene, might have led us to believe we were watching a documentary and of course, that abovementioned moment of transcendence during the final scenes. A Man Escaped is an interesting film that still has a relevance to it almost 50 years after it was first produced and, although it is far from Bresson's greatest work, it does show the filmmaker experimenting with ideas and techniques that would go towards creating and elevating his later classics.
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