I first saw A Man Escaped during a college film class. If memory serves, I found it interesting but a little boring. I also found the ending abrupt, anti-climatic and a little too easy.
Now? I still find the ending abrupt, anti-climatic and a little too easy. It’s not easy. It really isn’t. The whole film is about this prison break and the difficult lengths Fontaine goes through to make it to freedom.
But Bresson doesn’t linger enough on that last roadblock to liberation. He doesn’t milk it for all its worth. It’s maybe the one instance where I would’ve shot a little more intricately: close-ups on hands about to mess up or on Fontaine’s nervous face. That type of thing to just heighten tension one last time before the final release and resolution. Bresson could’ve accomplished this without sacrificing much of his simple aesthetic. I admire Bresson for sticking to his style from first frame to last frame, but that climatic moment needs something more. When we got to the end, I remember my college class being like, “That’s it?” I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel similar now.
But what if the supposedly flat climax was a feature and not a bug? Perhaps this scene is meant to show us that Fontaine was a man who functioned in a state of
Zanshin?
There is a famous Japanese proverb that says, “After winning the battle, tighten your helmet.”
In other words, the battle does not end when you win. The battle
only ends when you get lazy, when you lose your sense of commitment, and
when you stop paying attention. This is zanshin as well: the act of living with alertness regardless of whether the goal has already been achieved.
Applied to this situation, Fontaine is only now out of jail. The Nazis still control France. Fontaine needs to get back to the Resistance and resume the fight against Nazis. This was why he escaped. His escape, though a good thing, can hardly have been an end in itself.
In Scott Adam's terms. He was operating in a systems perspective. He was not in perpetual failure mode.
