A Man Escaped

''A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth'' (french: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, which literally translates as: "A man condemned to death has escaped or The wind blows where it wants"; the subtitle is a quote from ) is a 1956 French prison escape film directed by Robert Bresson. It is based on a memoir by André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance who was held in Montluc prison during World War II by the occupying Germans, though the protagonist of the film was given a different name.

The film was screened in competition at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, and it has been one of Bresson's most renowned works since its initial release.

Plot

In Lyon in 1943, Fontaine, a member of the French Resistance, jumps out of the car that is taking him to Montluc prison. He is immediately apprehended, and his German captors handcuff him, beat him, and lock him up. Throughout his time in prison, Fontaine regularly hears gunfire as other inmates are executed.

At first, Fontaine is placed in a cell on the ground floor of Montluc. He communicates with his neighbor by tapping on the wall and is regularly able to talk to Terry, a member of a small group that is allowed to exercise in a courtyard unsupervised, from his window. Terry takes Fontaine's letters to his family and superiors in the Resistance and gets him a safety pin so he can remove his handcuffs.

After fifteen days, Fontaine is moved to a cell on the top floor of Montluc, and he is no longer made to wear handcuffs. His new neighbor, Blanchet, is an elderly man who refuses to respond to his taps on the wall, but he gets to know several other inmates on his daily trips to empty his slop bucket and wash his face, even though the guards regularly admonish them for talking. After Blanchet faints while emptying his slop bucket, he and Fontaine begin to talk to each other at their windows.

Fontaine notices the wooden door of his cell is made up of thick boards joined together by a softer wood, so he sharpens the end of a spoon and begins to chisel away at the joints. After weeks of slow, silent, meticulous work, which involves keeping track of and disposing of every wood shaving and figuring out how to camouflage the damage he is doing to the door, he is able to get out of his cell into the hallway at will. He then makes some rope using most of his linens and the wire from his bed frame.

Some of Fontaine's fellow inmates begin to believe he may actually be able to figure out a way to escape from Montluc, and Orsini, who helped alert Fontaine to approaching guards while he was chiseling at his door, asks to come along. Fontaine shares his plan with Orsini, but Orsini thinks it is too complicated and instead tries to make a run for it one day as the inmates walk to empty their slop buckets. He is caught and returned to his cell while the plans are made for his execution, and he tells Fontaine to fashion hooks to scale the prison walls from the frame of the lighting fixture in his cell.

Fontaine makes more rope out of some cloth items he receives in a package, and Blanchet even donates a blanket to his escape effort. As time goes on, however, the other inmates begin to doubt Fontaine will ever really try to escape, and another prisoner refuses to join his plan, calling it unrealistic.

Shortly after learning he has been sentenced to death, Fontaine is given a cellmate. The young soldier, François Jost, says he has been convicted of desertion, but Fontaine suspects he may have been planted by the Nazis to get information. Fontaine spends some time feeling Jost out and ultimately decides to trust the boy and escape with him, knowing he would have to be killed otherwise.

One day, Fontaine says his goodbyes and tells Jost his plan. Jost understands he does not really have a choice, so he gets on board and helps make some more rope. The pair go into the hallway that night and reach the roof via a skylight. Fontaine slowly leads the way across the roof, taking advantage of the auditory cover provided by passing trains, and descends into a courtyard, where he kills a German guard. He and Jost climb a building and hook a rope across the gap between the inner and outer walls of the prison compound, but Fontaine loses his nerve and just sits there. Several hours later, he finally shimmies across the rope and drops down into the streets of Lyon, and he and Jost walk away from Montluc undetected.

Cast

*François Leterrier as Lieutenant Fontaine
*Charles Le Clainche as François Jost
*Maurice Beerblock as Blanchet
*Roland Monod as Pastor Deleyris
*Jacques Ertaud as Orsini
*Jean-Paul Delhumeau as Hebrard
*Roger Treherne as Terry
*Jean-Philippe Delamarre as Prisoner 110
*César Gattegno as Prisoner X
*Jacques Oerlemans as the head guard
*Klaus Detlef Grevenhorst as the Abwehr officer
*Leonhard Schmidt as the escort guard

Production

The film is based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance who escaped from Montluc prison in Lyon in 1943. Bresson had also been held by the Germans during WWII, though as a prisoner of war.

In an interview, Bresson said that, with ''A Man Escaped'', he "wanted to achieve a great purity, a greater asceticism than in ''Diary of a Country Priest''", noting his use of nonprofessional actors. The music that appears several times in the film is the ''Kyrie'' from Mozart's ''Great Mass in C minor'', K. 427.

Reception and legacy

Bresson won Best Director at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, and the film was named by the National Board of Review as one of the best foreign films of 1956. Today, the work is sometimes considered Bresson's masterpiece, and it came 69th in the 2012 ''Sight & Sound'' critics' poll. Roger Ebert wrote: "Watching a film like ''A Man Escaped'' is like a lesson in the cinema. It teaches by demonstration all the sorts of things that are not necessary in a movie. By implication, it suggests most of the things we're accustomed to are superfluous. I can't think of a single unnecessary shot in ''A Man Escaped''."

Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski was influenced by the film and ranked it as one of the top ten films that "affected" him the most. British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan was influenced by the film (along with Pickpocket) when making Dunkirk

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