The Cinematheque

35mm Print

“It’s probably the best movie ever made. Every time I watch it I cry.”

Benny Safdie

Hailed by François Truffaut at the time of its release as ​“the most important French film of the past ten years,” the masterly A Man Escaped is cited by many as Bresson’s pinnacle achievement. Based on the experiences of French resistance fighter André Devigny, and set to Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, the film recounts, in Bresson’s singular, spartan style, a condemned man’s single-minded efforts to escape a Nazi prison cell in Lyon. Eric Rohmer called the fastidious attention to the tools of the hero’s efforts—string, safety pin, spoon—“the miracle of objects.” Bresson, who’d been a POW himself, won Best Director honours at Cannes. When asked about the mystical tenor of the film, the director recalled, when as a prisoner, the overwhelming sense of an unseen hand guiding events; A Man Escaped​’s alternate title, The Wind Blows Where It Wishes, references John 3:8.

In French with English subtitles

“The greatest achievement of Robert Bresson [and] the best of all prison escape movies.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“The kind of film which inspires awe, even in an atheist.”

Nigel Floyd, Time Out