A Man Escaped movie review & film summary (1956)
If you removed the unnecessary shots from, say, Michael Bay's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," you would be left with two much shorter films: (1) a montage of the special effects action, which is all some people are interested in; (2) a montage of plot points and essential explanatory dialogue, which would be much shorter than (1). The entire film is a smash-up between those two little films.
What have you learned at the end of the Bay film? Nothing, because the characters and the robots are flatly impossible. There may be value in overcooked hyperaction, and I'm not saying there isn't. I've hugely enjoyed some action films for what they were. I admire "A Man Escaped" both for what it is, for what it isn't, and for what I learned from it.
What was that? In a famous book by Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, three directors are considered: Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer. Schrader feels transcendentalism is embedded in their work. Rather than involve ourselves in a deep discussion of transcendentalism, we might profitably start at the kindergarten level. The simplest parable for existentialism can be found in Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. He takes only 120 pages, but we need only a paragraph:
Sisyphus was a man condemned to spend his life pushing a stone up a mountain, and seeing it roll back down again. At the bottom of the mountain, I suggest, is death. Pushing the stone is life. It is tempting to give up on the bloody stone, but Camus (also a supporter of the Resistance) said that it was necessary to revolt. In Montluc, 7,000 men died, but Fontaine did not agree he need be one of them. Even if he were crushed by the stone rolling downhill over him, at least he tried. It is probably relevant to this film that Bresson himself was a member of the Resistance, and was imprisoned by the Nazis.
"A Man Escaped" is streaming on Hulu.
Ebert's Great Movies Collection also includes Bresson's "Pickpocket," "Diary of a Country Priest" and "Au Hasard Balthazar." And, for that matter, Dreyer's "Ordet" and "The Passion of Joan of Arc," and Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," "Through a Glass Darkly," "The Silence," "Winter Light" "Persona," "Cries and Whispers" and "Fanny and Alexander."
