colinr0380 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 2:53 pm
I will have to go back to re-watch the film, which I have not viewed in a number of years, but I really like thinking of this in relation to A Man Escaped. While both are procedural films about the labour intensive process of planning and executing a prison break, the Bresson film is much more austere and eventually transcendent (which interestingly bears comparison to Bresson's film The Trial of Joan of Arc in 1962), whilst Le Trou is, for lack of a better phrase, grittier. Both are about the minutiae of action but whilst the main drama of A Man Escaped is about a single figure and his plans until a cellmate is foisted upon him, leading to an interesting tense relationship of trust developing over how much to reveal and the danger of doing so (which perhaps ties into the Jean Genet homosexual tension aspect of Un Chant D'amour), in Le Trou the tensions are more group dynamic related and more homo-
social where the similar element of trust and whether there is a possibility of betrayal is still present but interestingly takes the approach of inclusion or exclusion from groups as its main focus. Everyone may be sharing a cell, but some will never be cellmates. And does that exclusion mean that they will naturally turn to ratting out to the guards, or has that character been forced to because they are tragically trapped between two groups that will never accept them, but will be the first to pay the price during any escape attempt.
So rather than entirely being about the detailed minutiae of the escape, Le Trou is as much about the social dynamics and how a group of men come together to work as a team, each with their defined roles (which I wonder calls back to something like the celebrated heist sequence in Rififi, and looks forward to a film like Escape From Alcatraz). And the moment that felt particularly impactful was of that one character briefly surfacing in the outside world and enjoying the feeling of liberation outside of the prison for a moment, before having to return back to captivity in order to wait for the escape attempt with the full gang to occur, which is a moment quite different from the way that A Man Escaped (and Escape From Alcatraz!) prevent their characters from accessing that final leap into freedom until their climactic moments. Whilst A Man Escaped (and Escape From Alcatraz) ends with an open-ended sense of the escapees literally disappearing into the fog (or harbour) to an uncertain fate whilst the film remains in the confines of the world of the prison, in Le Trou that moment gets at the strange, almost institutionalized, ambivalence of wanting to escape but knowing that there is nothing out there to escape to but the world that led them into captivity in the first place! The proof of escape is almost enough for at least that one character - the knowledge that they have a route out they can take whenever they may want - that makes existing in prison more palatable. Forbidden knowledge that can be shared between the cognoscenti of those deemed suitable within their peer group.
(And in Le Trou there is that opening scene with a character talking about their experiences whilst in jail now that they are out of it and seemingly back on the straight and narrow, which feels as if it makes the main narrative seem more like a nostalgic reminiscence about a group of guys engaged on a job as much as a story about confinement. Almost something like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet except with a prison setting!)
Colin, you make a few interesting points in regard to
Le Trou, chief of which is the comparison to
A Man Escaped. I'm going in another viewing of
LT with scenes from Renoir's
Grand Illusion in my head, mainly due to the spirit of comradery among the inmates or their "work as team", as you suggest. With the Renoir film, of course, French patriotism and WWI is the background and setting of the inmates' activity where the Bresson and Becker films are absent of this factor as a coalescing force behind the prison escape. Now, Renoir presents scenes as, essentially, composites or representations of the outside world. It makes the viewer question the meaning of "freedom" and "confinement", especially imo, as the subject of rehabilitation is not even considered in any of the three films. There doesn't seem to be any question of the inmates being fit to return to civilian life. The question isn't even broached. You may say rehabilitation is beyond the purview of
the prison film (at least in the 20th century) but I'd argue that films like
Shawshank Redemption present the alternative, even if it's merely a talking point within the narrative. Is it that the collective activity of the escape is
the good in the earlier films, eliminating any notion of reform being the ideal social condition? Or is prison what we inevitably make of aspects of our condition that we refuse to confront? It's hard to avoid these kinds of questions with any prison film, imo. Just wanted to make a note of my initial thoughts before another viewing of
LT.