A Film Canon

This astonishing film condenses the French Resistance to a series of disembodied, collaborative hands, and Andre Devigny's prison escape to his manual literacy; that is, his ability to make his hands 'speak', whether to those around him, or to the inanimate topography of the prison itself, which he caresses into submission. Not only are his most compelling friendships formed by 'knocking' to prisoners in adjoining cells, but his circulation of covert letters culminates with pencils being targeted as the prison's most dangerous, precious commodity. Concomitantly, Bresson strips non-professional actor Francois Leterrier's face - and faces in general - of any tangible content, evoking a world in which "the death of the friend I had never seen left me distraught", and breaking down the distinctions between animate and inanimate, physical and noumenal: "I tried to tell from their faces what kind of men they were. I looked at the walls too." Similarly, verbal articulation is reduced to so much threatening, distorted noise - from the outbursts of German and artillery fire that open the narrative, to the recurrent echoes of the prison corridors, to the tiny sounds that nuance the final escape - an exquisitely tense sequence on its own terms, and redolent of The Wages Of Fear in its ability to bring the entire weight of the universe to bear on a few physical variables. All these factors ensure that the escape takes on a more general signficance, which might be described as both existentialist and Christian - a search for meaning or an act of faith - as if to clarify the common denominator between the two as a staunch commitment to the apparently impossible: "Why are you doing this?" "To fight - fight against the walls, against myself, and my door."