an existential exit
by Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Becker, José Gijovanni, and Jean Aurel (based on a novel by José Giovanni),
Jacques Becker (director) Le Trou (The Hole) / 1960
Four
men imprisoned in France’s Santé Prison for various criminal acts, have determined
to break out. So begins what, at first, might seem like yet another film about
a prison break, and even I, who knew of Jacques Becker’s significant film
works, felt some reservations about the subject. What new angles could possibly
have been expressed in this 1960 film, especially since I had recently seen
Robert Bresson’s stunningly beautiful A
Man Escaped of four years earlier? Indeed Becker’s work bears some
similarity to Bresson’s in that his actors are amateurs, and he approaches his
subject, somewhat like Bresson, in an almost documentary style, beginning the
film, in fact, with a kind of testimony to its reality by Jean Keraudy, the
real-life mastermind of the attempted escape.

Yet we know something is still wrong.
The story Claude has given upon his imprisonment is that his wife had tried to
shoot him, and in his attempt to stop her, she herself was wounded. It is
clearly a kind of “romantic” entanglement that bears little resemblance to
events in the others’ lives. When at the last moment, Geo is called to the
warden’s office, where he is told that his wife has dropped her charges, and he
may be able to return home in a few months, the other men can only suspect that
something is amiss. He has spent two hours in the warden’s office; who, they
ask, might want to spend that much time with the warden? Although one of the
group, Geo, has determined not to join them in the escape, Claude still seems
determined to tag along, arguing that he probably will still get five years for
the accidental shooting.
As the first two men crawl into the hole
on their way to the freedom Bresson’s characters hope to attain, prison guards
march down the hall to arrest the entire “cell.” “They have been betrayed.

Although the subject of Becker’s film,
accordingly, may seem “old hat,” its method and cinematic revelation is
absolutely original and mesmerizing. At film’s end, it is as if we too, the
audience, have been betrayed, so linked have we become to the overwhelming
barriers these now seemingly ordinary men have sought to overcome. This is the
third time Roland has been caught in an attempted escape, and we know that his
fate, despite his appearance in the first frame of this film, will not be a
pleasant one. The world in which these men live is one in which everything is
cut-up and cut-off. Food is detestable, work not required (the men agree to create
cardboard boxes only to cover over their nocturnally-created “hole.”) It is
already a “hole,” a kind of pit into which they have been thrown and from which
they cannot now hope to escape. Yet, even in their arrestment, there still seems
to be between the original four cellmates a kind of allegiance, a brotherhood
that is more civilized than the rulers of this dreadful world into which in
which they have been devoured.
Sadly, Becker—whom several critics and I
feel has been underrated in the development of 20th century French
filmmaking—died a few weeks after the film was released.
Los Angeles,
August 24, 2013
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