Robert Bresson 1956A member of the French Resistance, Fontain, is taken into prison, where he devises a plot to escape.
The film is derived from complete fact, based upon the memoirs of Andre Devigny and is a minimalist, dark and yet very spiritual film. Bresson uses references to God and the Bible throughout, having some of the characters as priests and even naming the film after part of the Bible, John 3:8. However, the role of God and the spiritual are not overplayed as even the main character states that he will not wait around for the Lord to intervene. There is little dialect and the actors used are not actually actors but ‘models’ as Bresson called them; people with little to no experience in acting, a technique used in order to make the performances seem more authentic and legitimate. The fact that the models are not over-acting in order to better their role, means that the characters seem more rounded in the sense that they are going through motions and speech without much notice, a factor that is not only common in humans in captivity but also in the everyday person. Bresson himself expressed how he wanted to display emotion through no emotion, using the suppression of tension progressively from the study of minutia. This being displayed in continuous mundane activities that are repeated again and again.
Tension and hope fluctuate frequently throughout the film, from the activities of Fontain being drawn out endlessly while the audience becomes increasingly aware of his looming death sentence and to the fact that ‘the escape’ is imminent as the past tense 'escaped' of the title implies. However, the viewer still manages to find themselves tense as the situation unfolds , leading up to a climax when the ritual door locking of Fontain's room is at last shown from the outside. A mesmerising, if slightly understated film which I give 4 Stars.
