Robert Bresson's claustrophobic drama follows the plight of a French resistance member (Francoise Leterrier) imprisoned by the Nazis to await his execution. Against seemingly impossible odds, he fashions an audacious escape plan.
Bresson avoids any attempt at suspense or drama in this claustrophobic tale, choosing instead to focus on the gut-churning efforts of its hero to painstakingly remove the wooden planks in his door and construct a rope from discarded clothes and the wire mesh from his bed before his captors place him in front of a firing squad. Truth be told, this doesn't exactly make for riveting entertainment. Much of the film takes place in Leterrier's tiny cell and, while Bresson's choice of shots and angle is precisely and thoughtfully worked out, there is little sense of a race against time, or the prisoner's sweaty desperation. Bresson seems to go out of his way to avoid showing any action. In the opening scene, Leterrier's flight from the Nazi car escorting him to the prison takes place off-screen as the camera rests on the impassive face of his travelling companion. It's probably the only time that Leterrier is off-screen.
The German captors are rarely seen, a device that seems to emphasise the prisoner's suffocating dilemma while distancing the viewer further from any real sense of peril. At the end of the film, having managed to flee his cell and scale the roof of the prison, the prisoner's nerve seems to fail him, and this, for me, was the one moment that stood above all the others. He has worked diligently and tirelessly alone and now, with his young recently-installed cell-mate in tow, he seems to feel truly alone and vulnerable for the first time in the picture. It's an undeniably powerful touch but, for me, it comes too late and its presence simply underlines the drearily low-key tone of all that has gone before.
Bresson avoids any attempt at suspense or drama in this claustrophobic tale, choosing instead to focus on the gut-churning efforts of its hero to painstakingly remove the wooden planks in his door and construct a rope from discarded clothes and the wire mesh from his bed before his captors place him in front of a firing squad. Truth be told, this doesn't exactly make for riveting entertainment. Much of the film takes place in Leterrier's tiny cell and, while Bresson's choice of shots and angle is precisely and thoughtfully worked out, there is little sense of a race against time, or the prisoner's sweaty desperation. Bresson seems to go out of his way to avoid showing any action. In the opening scene, Leterrier's flight from the Nazi car escorting him to the prison takes place off-screen as the camera rests on the impassive face of his travelling companion. It's probably the only time that Leterrier is off-screen.
The German captors are rarely seen, a device that seems to emphasise the prisoner's suffocating dilemma while distancing the viewer further from any real sense of peril. At the end of the film, having managed to flee his cell and scale the roof of the prison, the prisoner's nerve seems to fail him, and this, for me, was the one moment that stood above all the others. He has worked diligently and tirelessly alone and now, with his young recently-installed cell-mate in tow, he seems to feel truly alone and vulnerable for the first time in the picture. It's an undeniably powerful touch but, for me, it comes too late and its presence simply underlines the drearily low-key tone of all that has gone before.