Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)

(Criterion Streaming, November 2020) I have said some very dismissive things about writer-director Robert Bresson in past reviews, but Un condamné à mort s’est échappé makes me want to walk back some of that commentary. Bresson’s typically sparse and detached style ends up being a near-ideal match for this topic matter here, as he intensely studies every twitch and action standing between a French Resistance leader and his escape from a Nazi prison during WW2. Bresson, working from a real-life memoir, himself knew what he was talking about, having himself been imprisoned by Nazi authorities during WW2. His quiet, drawn-out approach works well here, maintaining the suspense of the ongoing escape, and relying on a meta-tapestry of thrills (that is: the threat of being shot, the evil of the Nazis, the patriotic meaning of La Resistance) outside of what he is showing on-screen. It’s a clever film, stripped of the histrionics of not-dissimilar movies such as The Great Escape but effective in its own way. The film’s world is the prison—it ends as soon as the lead character is no longer in it. Sometimes a director’s idiosyncratic approach proves to be irritating until it’s applied to the right context, and that’s how I feel about Bresson here—I can’t stand much of his filmography, but it happens to be the exact right fit for the topic matter here, and the result is without a doubt not only my favourite film of his, but an essential French film of the 1950s.