Have to check this out one of these days
Escape Plan
(Plot discussed in close detail)
Who’d have thought Bresson, he of the austere aestheticism and rigorous philosophy, could make such an effective thriller as A Man Escaped? That opening sequence of Lt. Fontaine about to attempt a break from a car is as superbly timed and edited–with the suspense stretched out into a thin, taut wire–as anything from Kurosawa or Eisenstein.
Bresson’s visual style couldn’t be more fitting for the setting–the whole movie is focused on the title character, in a series of tight medium shots and close-ups. The camera is trained on him, and since he operates in such a small space, it rarely strays elsewhere. The impression of claustrophobic confinement is thus emphasized, even magnified–about an hour of the way through you dearly wish for a shot of a tree, of the sky, of something outside the prison walls, which Bresson refuses to grant (the final shots are of more walls, glimpsed through thick fog, and at night). A voiceover keeps you constantly inside Fontaine’s head, telling you what he thinks and feels with direct simplicity.
via Critic After Dark: Un condamné à mort (A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson 1956).