Le Trou (The Hole)

Jacques Becker completed Le Trou ("The Hole") two weeks before he died in 1960. The film is a bare, stripped-to-the-bones prison-escape picture.  Five men who live together in a small cell spend weeks involved in meticulous efforts to escape from Sante Prison, a penitentiary in Paris.  The film is just about perfect in all respects and, at times, almost unbearably suspenseful.  There's not much to say about a movie of this kind -- the Criterion disk is devoid of any extras at all.  Famous prison escape pictures include Bresson's A Man Condemned to Death Escaped, a meditation on escape as something transcendental, as if overcoming gravity and the bonds of the flesh.  The Great Escape is a Hollywood war picture, with carefully delineated and charismatic characters, much derring-do, and elaborate sequences depicting the fates of the escaped men after succeeding in their efforts -- it's an adventure film. The Grand Illusion, Renoir's POW escape-film on which Becker worked as an assistant director, is concerned with class and social rank, all as teased-out during the course of an escape by tunnel -- as in the Hollywood picture, the protagonists are all carefully characterized and the film details their post-escape adventures.  The Shawshank Redemption is based on a Stephen King story and, therefore, shallow, suspenseful, and full of horrors.  Le Trou is so stripped-down that we can't conceive of any adventures or, even, life beyond the escape.  Four of the five characters are not provided with any back-stories -- we don't know why they are in jail.  Other escape films propose that after the hardships of burrowing or breaking down walls with sharpened spoons, the characters will escape, that is be free of the prison in which they are trapped.  By contrast, Le Trou shows us that the escape is accomplished in itself -- the efforts and labor required to escape are the escape.  There is nothing beyond the hardships of escaping -- that is, escape is an existential activity that is not undertaken for the benefits of being free, but which, in fact, frees its participants by its own rigors and challenges.  Prison life is dull, tedious, uneventful; the escape is freedom from that confinement whatever its practical outcome.

Becker is intensely humanistic and he observes every tiny detail involved in the escape efforts;these little details are actions that delineate the characters who are defined by what they do and, equally, by how they do it -- the Hemingway dictum about "grace under pressure" is everywhere applicable to Le Trou.  The prisoners form an intensely intimate group, a society defined by its commitment to escape -- human beings achieve solidarity with one another, not through the outcomes of their efforts to achieve a better world (most of which go awry) but through their cooperative endeavors whatever the result.  The film is shot rigorously in claustrophobic black and white.  All spaces involved in the escape efforts are carefully and precisely defined and become nightmarishly familiar to the viewer.  Each step of the endeavor is presented as schematically as You-Tube video showing you how to change an air filter or mix a cocktail -- generally, we watch actions unfold in what seems to be real-time, much sawing, chopping, and pounding observed in long takes, some of them several minutes.  The film has very little plot other than documenting the escape.  A young man with a good education, Claude Gaspard, is imprisoned with four others in a tiny cell.  He is a newcomer and seems to come from a social class different from the other working class prisoners.  Unlike them, he has a back-story:  in a quarrel with his wife, she aimed a shotgun at him; he wrestled with her and the gun discharged wounding her.  He's incarcerated under charges of Attempted First Degree Murder.  The other prisoners, mostly middle-aged men, are baffled by his story -- they can't figure out why the woman hasn't withdrawn the charges since she seems to still love him and, in fact, someone sends him weekly packages of sausage, smoked fish, cheese, and sugar. (An important element of the film, establishing the maximum security aspects of the prison, involves the guards chopping up the food to make sure that there is no contraband inside.)  As it happens, Claude Gaspard was sleeping with the woman's teenage sister (at least, this is suggested) and this relationship resulted in the fateful fight.  Late in the movie, Gaspard's girlfriend, his wife's sister, appears for a visit and suggests that she still loves him.  Unlike the other prisoners, Gaspard still has some personal possessions, a gold-plated cigarette lighter from his wife confiscated early in the picture that establishes a personal relationship between him and the warden -- the warden seems to recognize Gaspard as someone elevated above the ordinary convicts in Le Sante.  After some deliberation, Gaspard's new cell-mates decide that he is worthy to join them in the escape effort and he becomes part of their team.  Indeed, Gaspard who is well-educated but was living off his wife's money (he had earlier been a used car salesman) finds a meaning to his life in the escape undertaking -- for the first time, in his life, it seems, he has found a purpose.

The escape itself involves elaborate efforts involving uprooting a floor, building sand-glasses so that the inmates can time their activities to avoid encounters with roving patrols of guards and sawing through iron bars.  The prison security has the disconcerting habit of walking into the cells without notice and shaking down the prisoners.  A mirrored periscope is ingeniously created to monitor the activities of the guards in the corridor.  The escapees build dummies that can be moved to make it seem that they are sleeping when the guards make their circuit and peer through a peephole into the little cell.  After breaking through the prison cell's floor, the men wander around in a subterranean labyrinth, evade guards who patrol the basements, and, then, have to cut through a stone wall around a block of reinforced cement forming a wall over the sewer under the prison.  There are lots of sequences involving strenuous hacking at rock walls, cave-ins, close-calls and the like.  It's all very exciting and the men are extremely clever and meticulous in their efforts to avoid the discovery of what is, after all, a complicated industrial job of demolition.  French maximum security prisons seem to be overcrowded, with not much in the way of rehabilitative services -- the protagonists work at folding cardboard into boxes -- and everyone sleeps on mattresses just thrown on the floor.  The food is apparently atrocious and exercise is limited to a walk in the hall, something that we don't ever really see.  Everyone chain-smokes Gauloises and the theft of a couple boxes of cigarettes leads to some violence which is, in fact, endorsed  by prison guards -- the prisoners get to regulate themselves with respect to infractions committed between inmates.  

Becker showed his audiences Le Sante prison in the famous, and shattering, climax to Casque d'Or -- this is where the film's hero was beheaded -- and some of the morbid, death-infected aspects of the end of the earlier film are obvious in Le Trou as well.  The film is excellent, shot in heightened documentary style, apparently in Le Sante itself and the story is drawn from events involving a real escape attempt, the subject of a best-selling book in the late fifties.  The actors are all non-professional (although after the movie some of them were successful in theater and other films) -- one of the men is played by an ex-convict who was actually involved in the escape effort.  It's hard to write about the movie without giving away plot points.  You should see this picture for yourself.  It has one of the most devastating last lines in film history.