Le Trou

Le Trou – Le Trou is a French prison-break film directed by Jacques Becker and released in 1960. It’s an austere, documentary-like account of five prisoners attempting escape from a small cell in Sante prison in Paris. The inmates are apparently awaiting outcomes to judicial appeals and are subject to continuous surveillance, an aspect of the film that aroused skepticism in me – do French prisons really exercise the degree of paranoid security shown in this film? The picture is economically and lucidly directed – every aspect of the prison-break scheme is lovingly detailed and the viewer has a very precise sense for the organization of the facility and the topography that must be navigated to successfully escape. Despite its formidable and intimidating setting, the film is very gentle and has a kindly spirit – the prisoners seem to genuinely like one another, display great ingenuity and camaraderie in their efforts, and the film is conspicuously non-violent. There is something exceedingly Gallic about a film that focuses on the prisoners displaying generosity to one another by sharing cheeses, pate, and sausages mailed in from the outside. Everyone is very polite and the guards are reasonably accommodating. Most American prison films are lurid spectacles of sadism. This picture instead posits a complex “cat and mouse” game played for high-stakes, but still fundamentally a kind of sport. The movie is continuously engaging, the characters are fascinating and beautifully portrayed by actors with memorable mugs, and parts of the film ratchet the suspense to a nerve-wracking level – there is immense amounts of burrowing (the film’s title means The Hole) ,chiseling, filing, manufacture of steel keys and dummy-figures to persuade the guards that the escapees are slumbering in their beds. The picture resembles Clint Eastwood’s excellent Escape from Alcatraz and is derived from Howard Hawks’ films about teams of men engaged in dangerous and difficult activities that require “grace under pressure” – I thought of Hawks’ Only Angels have Wings, Hatari, and Red River while watching the movie. The ending is surprising and devastating and reveals that the film is really about friendship and loyalty – the prison-break plot is only a pretense for other, more important, concerns. This is an excellent picture, apparently uncharacteristic of Becker’s oeuvre, and not well-known to American audiences. The film has always been overshadowed by Bresson’s A Condemned Man Escaped, which the movie superficially resembles, but which is completely different in emphasis – Bresson’s film is theological, Becker’s movie is resolutely mechanical and materialistic, it’s about how to do things. Claustrophobic and shot in densely packed close-ups – you are always aware of the tight confinement in the cell – a scene in which two of the protagonists emerge from a manhole and see a taxi rolling down a murky wet street before dawn, the bulk of the prison looming in the background, provides a weird and, even, radiant sense of release and liberation.