‘Film is a visual medium: show, don’t tell’ would be the often repeated mantra for budding screenwriters and film-makers. But, we don’t often get well-constructed movies about people doing precise stuffs. I am not talking about the sweeping camera movements of Emmanuel Lubezki that makes everyone of us go ‘wow’. But, I am more fascinated by the simple people doing clever, elaborate things, driven by untamed spirit (not that there’s nothing wrong with Lubezki’s waltzing camera movements). Think about the way Paul Thomas Anderson sets up the form and characterization in the opening scene of epic “There Will Be Blood”; or the canvas of beauty and brutality in Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive”; or else Coen brother’s stupendous visual weight diffused into Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men”. These few examples of contemporary cinema tells us how the dialogues and the detailing of characters’ background just got to be the icing on a cake, while their visuals seeps in enormous tension by both expressing as well as obscuring. More than five decades before, French film-maker Jacques Becker made a film about the arduous quest of common, imperfect people, documenting their actions with one-of-a-kind visual exactness. This movie entitled “Le Trou” (1960) was based on a novel by Jose Giovanni and regarded as one of the greatest French film ever made by the master of pacing, composition and lighting Jean-Pierre Melville.
Jacques Becker died nearly a month before (on Feb. 21, 1960)
the release of his last film “Le Trou”. He was a friend and worked as assistant
to greatest artist of cinema Jean Renoir. Although Becker’s oeuvre was admired
by French New Wave members, his brilliant works like “Touchez pas au Grisbi”,
“Antoine et Antoinette”, and “Casque d’Or” were overlooked by critics and
general audiences of the era. Becker’s works persistently observed simple
humans, driven by mundane activities to achieve great triumphs. His way of
observation never calls attention to the imagery. As Mr. Ebert says about
Becker’s visuals: “Almost everything is seen at eye level, point of view is
respected, and the style shrinks from calling attention to itself”. Becker’s
“Le Trou” has the most economical and oft repeated central plot: five
prisoners, waiting in the cell for their unpleasant judgement, decide to tunnel
their way out from the sprawling Sante prison in Paris. But the delicate,
scrupulous visuals immediately pull viewers into the narrative, making us an
active participant in the narrative.
“Le Trou” is about men breaking out of a dour place,
although the movie opens in a fourth-wall breaking manner with an introduction
from Jean Keraudy, who plays Roland in the film, and was involved in the real
prison-break attempt in 1947. Then Becker cuts to ominous and intimidating
premise of Sante prison, setting up a minutely expressive tone, from which it
never wavers. We are first introduced to Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), whose
keepsake cigarette lighter is scrutinized by warden and Gaspard being a model
prisoner is left of with a warning. Since his cell block is under going
refurbishment, Gaspard is transferred to an over-crowded cell, occupied by four
other inmates – Manu (Philip Leroy), Roland (Jean Keraudy), Jo (Michael Constantin) and Monseigneur (Raymond Meunier). The way they bear their stress,
their manner of speech and idenity are vastly different, but there’s an evident
kinship between them.
Gaspard says that it feels to be good among them and shares
the cigarettes and privileged food items, he receives from his mistress. The four
are naturally suspicious of his arrival, especially considering their hazardous
near-future plan. They question about Gaspard’s crime and family background.
Gaspard is in for attempted first-degree murder. He has had an argument with
his rich wife for having an affair with her 17 year old sister. The argument
moved onto shot gun waving and ensues in a shoulder injury to wife. Considering
the severity of charges against him, the four comment that Gaspard is at least
gonna serve 15 years. There’s honesty and naivety in the way Gaspard conducts
him and so the four decided to confide in him. Not the stories about what
pushed them into prison or how innocent they are; the four just explain their
plan to dig a hole in the cell floor. ‘The hole’ would be concealed by the box
making card-boards, which the prisoners have volunteered to work on. Before
long, Roland – the escape artist – initiates the backbreaking plan and as days
go past, they all dig, keep watch, exchange foods and little life stories.
‘So what’s great about this mundane prison-break story?’
might be the question that rises to one’s mind after reading the basic plot. As
in the greatest works of cinema, the answer doesn’t lie on ‘what’ but ‘how’.
The ‘how’, by which I mean Becker’s acute, awe-inspiring attention to detail
and pursuit for pragmatic realism. The screenplay by Becker and Giovanni doesn’t
employ any flashbacks and tells what we need to understand about the characters
only through the current scenario. When the men sit in circles or semi-circles,
they don’t go on and on about their life before prison or dreams after getting
out. Those scenes are not to do cinematic justification, but a precise
recreation of walled in life. The four prisoners plus Gaspard are inherently
shown as hard-working and trustworthy as all the officers & workers in
prison thinks of them as model prisoners. It’s a simple setting that makes us
empathize with them, without worrying about their crimes or background. It is
said in the wake of World War II (the period this film was set in) quite a many
good, hardworking people are imprisoned for one reason or another. Director
Becker himself faced imprisonment in those times and so more empathy is
exhibited towards the accused. Despite the rising stress levels, they rarely
take it out on the fellow inmates (the sequence involving plumber is the only
occasion we see them violent and furious). The writers also don’t provide any
before hand explanation of their escape plan (through dialogues). We see Roland
unscrewing a bolt from metal cot and separating the cot leg. After doing that,
he says ‘it will do’. We don’t know what he is going to with it, which is left
to express through unbroken imagery.
If the characters deliberately lack the meticulous details,
Becker’s film form is full of delicate constructions as well as
deconstructions. In one of the movie’s intense and highly memorable sequence,
the camera (cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet) lingers for nearly four minutes
(an unbroken take) as Roland, Geo and Manu take turns in breaking through
cell’s floor. The actors performed this scene on real time and the shot
concentrates on their hands, indicating the excruciating nature of the task and
their overpowering physicality. In a later scene, Roland cuts through a metal
bar, wherein once again the shot captures the intense breath and movement of
hands. There’s a breaking of small, hidden piece of mirror, which is
constructed to serve as periscope. An hour glass is made cleverly to pin-point
the passage of time. A prison guard painstakingly looks through food parcels,
cutting packets of soap and butters to search for any contraband stuff. Those
unedited moments of construction and deconstruction reflect the tedious
constancy of life inside prison as well as the adaptation of monotony (like
digging, keeping up the time, etc) to eventually break-out from there. A slight
mishandling of this documentary-style realism would have rendered viewers
inattentive, but Becker and Cloquet completely enshroud us in this confined environment
that we just marvel about the ingenuity at work. It is also vital to understand
that despite all the physicality of direction, “Le Trou” greatly succeeds due
to unforced humanistic moments.
The small hole in the
floor of prison cell could be viewed as symbolization of the men’s psyche
confined within four walls. As the film progresses, the men go through bigger
holes or in the arduous process of creating bigger holes, which further creates
intense doubts or bewilders their psyche. Of course, Becker doesn’t use the
presence of holes to create cheap symbolism or psychological moments. And,
although the transformation of Gaspard forms the emotional anchor for the film,
there’s only a sense of pity and irony rather than heavy doses of
sentimentality. The non-professional acting cast performs their roles with an
understated, natural force that perfectly highlights the characters’ friendly,
patient nature. It would have also been a harder task for professional actors
to display such manual dexterity like these men, especially Roland (with
half-amputated fingers).
Trailer
In the age of pompous protagonists making overblown escape
plans, “Le Trou” (126 minutes) offers an unforgettable, edge-of-the-seat movie
experience with the detailing of prosaic movements. The movie’s humanistic core
and emotional truth withholds a timeless quality, waiting be embraced by
cinephiles all over the world.
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