2017 WRAP UP PART 5

Robert Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED (1956) ranks as one of the greatest escape from prison movies ever made. All of you who think SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) is a great film really need to cool your jets and watch this spare, laser focused masterpiece. Fontaine (Francois Leterrier), a French resistance fighter, is imprisoned in Lyon by the Nazis during WWII. We first see his hands, fidgeting, as he sits in the back seat of an automobile on the way to prison. The confines of the car are cramped, claustrophobic and Fontaine attempts a daring escape. He's thwarted, beaten, handcuffed and sent to prison where he immediately starts planning and executing a slow, methodical and painstakingly detailed escape. Bresson keeps his focus entirely on Fontaine and his plan throughout the film. There's no back story, no sub plot, no romance, no interaction with his faceless German captors. Bresson and cinematographer Leonce-Henri Burel constantly show us Fontaine's hands as he works with the material available to enact his escape. All of the shots in the cell are tight, cramped, suffocating. Even when Fontaine manages to leave his cell, the camera never goes wide. Everything is tightly shot and composed until the final frame. What happens next? That's of little or no concern to Bresson. The unrelenting gaze here, the entirety of his attention and ours is on one thing and one thing only: escape. A MAN ESCAPED is a brilliant, audacious film that manages to create an incredible amount of suspense while celebrating the unbreakable, indomitable will of one man who must be free. This breathtaking masterpiece of the French cinema gets my highest recommendation.

Special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, who cut his teeth on Stanley Kubrick's monumental 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), directed only two science fiction films but they are solid, respectable works that are both thought provoking and visually spectacular. His first, SILENT RUNNING (1972), is an ecological fable played out among the planets of our solar system while BRAINSTORM (1983), is an exploration of the impact of a highly advanced technology on the humans who interact with it. Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) and Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) develop a device that records all of the sensory input of one person onto tape which can then be played back and experienced as a virtual reality through the use of first a helmet, then a more efficient visor. Anything a person experiences can be recorded and played back for someone else to live. Experiences such as hang gliding, riding a roller coaster, surfing, horse back riding, etc, are recorded and made available for playback. Even sex. And when Lillian unexpectedly dies while wearing the recording helmet, her death is captured on tape. Michael is obsessed with playing the tape to experience Lillian's death vicariously but his loving wife and fellow scientist Karen (Natalie Wood) and project director Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson) won't allow it. Of course he plays the tape and experiences the beyond before being yanked back to reality by the steadfast love of his wife (just as William Hurt was saved by Blair Brown in the climax of Ken Russell's ALTERED STATES (1980)). The technical gimmick of BRAINSTORM when it was theatrically released was that all of the scenes of "reality" were shot and presented in standard 35 mm format. Whenever the film went into "virtual reality" mode, the aspect ratio expanded to 70mm, filling the entire screen with a huge, immersive image. Of course, that visual device loses some punch when watching the film on a television screen but the prints still adhere to that standard/wide screen/standard format. BRAINSTORM was, of course, sadly the last film Natalie Wood made. She died during production and one can't help but wonder how different the film could have been had she lived. Nonetheless, BRAINSTORM is a first rate piece of intelligent cinematic science fiction. Thumbs up.