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Summary
1947. A young man, Gaspard Claude, is convicted for the attempted murder of his
wife, although he is innocent of the crime. He is sent to the notorious Santé
Prison in Paris and is placed in a cell with four hardened criminals. The latter
have decided to escape from the prison by digging their way out of their cell. Reluctantly,
they take Gaspard into their confidence and labour intensely to effect their escape.
Then, just when escape appears certain, Gaspard is called away to see the prison governor...
Review
Le Trou, Jacques Becker’s last film, is undoubtedly the director's best work and
was hailed at the time (particularly by the New Wave directors such as François
Truffaut) as a masterpiece. Today, it remains a compelling film, superbly directed
and photographed with a remarkable attention to detail.
The film bears some similarity to Robert Bresson’s 1956 film Un condamné à
mort s’est échappé in that both describe an arduous and meticulously
detailed attempt to escape from a prison. However, whereas Bresson’s film is more
a spiritual work, a study in faith and redemption, Becker’s film is anchored in grim reality.
The romantic artifice in Bresson’s film is entirely absent here. Becker concentrates
entirely on the physical and mental ordeal and offers us one of the most gruelling cinema
experiences. His protagonists are very much flesh and blood mortal beings,
not just humbled by their predicament, but totally humiliated. The desire to escape
is not a question of life and death, as it is in Bresson's film. Here, it is driven
simply by the need to be free of a soul-destroying regime which treats its prisoners like
animals.
The most striking difference between Bresson's film and Becker's Le Trou is the
brutal realism in the latter. In the desperate relentless pounding of iron
against stone which dominates our senses when the prisoners attempt to break out of their
prison, it is virtually impossible not to share their frustration, their pain, their optimism.
You can clearly imagine the sweat on their backs and the blisters on their hands, and
each time a fragment of stone crumbles away, you are grateful and cheered, as if you were
one of the escaping prisoners. Becker's realism not only creates a stunningly compelling
film, but it really does manage to involve the audience in his story, achieving the closest
thing to virtual reality in traditional cinema.
To add to the feeling of realism, Becker uses non-professional actors and the film has
not one note of music in it. His direction is masterful in this, his most suspense-filled
film. The film is loosely based on the experiences of thriller writer José
Giovanni, who was himself involved in an attempted break-out from the Santé Prison.
As in many of the films he subsequently directed, Giovanni’s personal insight brings a
gritty verisimilitude to heighten the film’s dramatic impact and sense of realism. One
of the cellmates involved in Giovanni’s real-life prison break-out, Jean Keraudy, even
had a starring role in this film.
© James Travers 2001
Essay Jacques Becker is among the minor glories of French
cinema. While in his twenties he began as an assistant to Jean Renoir, working on,
among others, the (brilliant) communist film La vie est à nous (1936) and the most
famous P.O.W. and prison-escape film ever made, La grande illusion (1937). In the
mid-1930s he also began directing his own short films; in the following decade, feature-length
films. He didn't hit his stride, though, until the 1950s, with three works each
showcasing a magnificent performance: Casque d'or (1952), starring Simone Signoret, Touchez
pas au grisbi (1953), starring Jean Gabin, and Montparnasse 19 (1958), about the painter
Mondigliani, starring Gérard Philipe, a project passed on to Becker upon the death
of Max Ophüls. His next film, his last, was released just a month before his own
death, by heart attack, at 53: Le trou (called The Night Watch in the U.S.), which focused
on a group--in this case, five incarcerated men planning their escape--and which featured
no major star in a galvanizing role. (The cast in fact consists of nonprofessionals.)
Based on an actual postwar incident (Becker had begun work on the script in 1947), Le
trou--literally, The Hole--is regarded by many as the director's best. It is certainly
an exceptionally fine, if distinctly minor, piece of work. It's a strange film,
in which a boy, Claude Gaspard, awaiting sentencing for shooting his wife in the shoulder
is moved in Paris's Santé prison from one cell block, which is "undergoing repairs,"
to another, his new cell being already occupied by the normal limit of four men, in this
case, four hardened, long-term criminals. Gaspard forms an interesting contrast
with the others: at 27, he is the youngest of the five; unlike theirs, his background
is privileged; and he is the best looking of the group--indeed, almost too handsome.
His intrusion invites both hearty befriending and testy suspiciousness from the others.
One must add that the warden himself has taken a sufficient shine to the boy--at times
he seems as fixated on Claude as does Becker's camera--that an aura of Billy Buddism begins
pervading the atmosphere. Becker's symbol for the "appeal" that Gaspard has for
the warden is the boy's fuelless gold cigarette lighter, which, in the warden's hand,
rivets the latter's attention.
Gaspard is weak--and a betrayer. The quarrel with his wife that resulted in her
getting shot by the gun he claims she brandished and he was trying to wrestle away from
her was over his affair with her younger sister, who was living with them. Thus
we know from the start, as probably the warden knows and as his cell-mates, reasonably,
must come to know, that this soft-looking boy lacks the capacity to regard either marriage
or family relations as sacrosanct. In the end, when the warden informs him that
his wife has withdrawn charges against him and the state will be momentarily closing the
case, Gaspard informs on his cell-mates, revealing their escape plans--on one level, an
act so shameful that Becker proceeds with a cut that hides the revelation from view, requiring
us to interpolate it.
Practically, the boy could do nothing else; once released, he would draw new charges against
himself if his silence helped his former cell-mates to escape. But Becker permits
no pause for our realizing this. Rather, he devises a conversation between warden
and Gaspard that blurs the line between the former's paternalistic concern for the young
prisoner and his homoerotic attachment to him; the warden, to say the least, is most solicitous
of any disclosures by Claude that might somehow unburden the boy, who seems oddly pensive,
even troubled by the news of his imminent release from detention. In a move highly
suggestive of Melville's Captain Vere, the warden sends the boy back to the same cell,
this time as an accomplice in ensnaring the other four prisoners. Claude Gaspard
will betray the group and its members as easily as he betrayed his wife.
It is, therefore, not to La grande illusion that we must compare Becker's film, but to
the celebrated prison-escape film--Robert Bresson took for it the directorial prize at
Cannes, and François Truffaut called it "the most crucial French film of the past
ten years"--which only recently preceded it: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé
ou le vent souffle oú il veut (A Man Escaped, 1956). Based on an autobiographical
story by André Devigny, a French Resistance fighter imprisoned by the Gestapo,
A Man Escaped finds Lt Fontaine having either to trust or to kill his new cell-mate, a
teenaged boy who has already worked for the Germans, in order to proceed with his plans
for escape. Fontaine decides to trust the boy: a stunning act of will for which
he is prepared to accept the consequences. The boy does not betray him; instead,
it turns out that the boy's help is absolutely necessary to effect the escape of both.
The final shot at night of the two on their path to (still danger-fraught) freedom, as
the world lies open before them, is among the most thrilling images in cinema. It
is to be compared, inevitably, to the close of John Milton's seventeenth-century epic
poem Paradise Lost--only here, in its modern context, it celebrates the prospects of existential
humanity.
Becker's Le trou might be interpreted as a sour, even cynical answer to Bresson's A Man
Escaped but for the shame assigned to Gaspard's disloyalty and the solidarity of the other
four prisoners. Their individual and collective humanity are what most impress us;
Gaspard withers away in our consciousness to mere nothingness. We couldn't care
less about his fate. Indeed, Becker's film may be viewed as a coda to Bresson's
film, compelling us to reflect backwards and celebrate afresh the boy's proof of his moral
mettle there. Gaspard's self-interest is outshone by the boy's trustworthiness in
A Man Escaped.
There are three principal differences to the two black-and-white films, apart from the
different outcomes of risky trust already addressed. While Becker's film is secular,
Bresson's is deeply religious; Léonce-Henry Burel's subtly inflected cinematography
helps Bresson to suggest a spiritual presence accompanying Fontaine that enables him to
trust (where he might otherwise kill) and to prevail in no small measure because of this
trust. Also, there is no homoerotic element in Bresson's film. Thirdly, condemned
to death and repeatedly brutalized by his captors, Fontaine's situation is the more dire--all
the moreso for its identification with national purpose. Unlike Fontaine, Becker's
cell-mates are ordinary criminals, not political prisoners. They are treated (until
they make their foiled attempt at escape) decently, not harshly. Indeed, the only
brutality we see prior to the film's inevitably violent finish is their own when, a vengeful
mob, they beat up two other prisoners for stealing some money of theirs and material items.
Still, it would be a mistake to discount the seriousness with which Becker's film also
pursues the theme of humanity's love of freedom. For in fact their seeming lack
of a pressing need to escape focuses our attention on how important freedom is to all
but one of these prisoners. (One of the original four is ambivalent about joining
in the escape.) Why not simply serve one's time rather than invite the risk of being
caught, even killed, or at least ending up serving even more time in prison? The
answer, of course, is freedom's call.
The "hole" to which the film's title refers is not the modern prison that holds the men
or even their Spartan cell; it's the hole they dig in their cell for the escape.
Much of the film's visual fascination revolves around the painstaking process, using a
file, by which a hole is dug through concrete to the sewer underneath the prison and,
once this is accomplished, the images of men slipping through the hole with astonishing
speed and grace.
A splendid shot occurs on the occasion of the hole's inauguration, when the two men on
the digging detail that night--each night the men would work in two's--pass through the
sewer and poke their heads up a manhole cover, drinking in a draught of the city street:
freedom. Becker and his cinematographer, Ghislain Cloquet, achieve a graciousness
and poetic loveliness in this glimpse by the men of the everyday outdoors. Most
remarkable is this application, to city sights, of feelings generally identified with
the country. Becker succeeds in an instant in making Paris a place of the mind and
the spirit.
It is often said that while Bresson in A Man Escaped stresses objects, Becker in Le trou
stresses faces and bodies--the human element. (The film is also notable for its
heightened use of sounds, especially during the chipping of concrete and filing of metal
in preparation for the escape, and culminating in a discordance suited to the disastrous
result of the escape attempt.) Regardless, Bresson achieves the more powerful vision
of humanity and its possibilities; Le trou is a film of smaller aims. It doesn't
help that Becker seems at times to be picking a gratuitous quarrel with a masterpiece.
One is saddened by the degree of petty envy that must have been motivating him.
I first saw Le trou as a teenaged boy with my parents. It says something for the
film's universality, surely, that on this rare occasion a film drew our unanimous approval.
It's too bad, though, that some have turned this good little film into a bone of contention
by making extraordinary claims for it. Le trou stands short and sturdy, while Bresson's
A Man Escaped is a towering example of transcendental cinema.
© Dennis Grunes 2003
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