Fact/film/fiction

Before I left for the screening, my 16-year-old son asked about the movie I was going to see. What sort of movie would be good enough that a presumably sane person would pass up the Grammys for it, right? It's about a member of the French Resistance being held prisoner by the Nazis in World War II, I explained, and how he escapes. The title being what it is, spoiler alerts aren't exactly an issue here. It's based on a true story, I added. At that point, my wife, aesthetic purist that she is, interjected that that was irrelevant. She'd seen "A Man Escaped," and on a big screen, no less (I'd previously seen it only on video). So I deferred to her on that one and ended my explanation there.

Except that I shouldn't have. Bresson, who's about as purist a filmmaker as there's ever been (okay, Ozu and late Dreyer, then Bresson), would seem to have thought otherwise. He begins the film with a note that it's based on a true story. Our knowledge of this fact -- and "fact" is the word -- proves crucial to a viewer's appreciation of the subsequent 99 minutes. Knowing that various highly improbable acts did actually occur -- a spoon being providentially found lying on the ground, a no-less providential parcel arriving in the mail, and so on -- lends both a gravity and plausibility to the film that are crucial to its success. What would otherwise seem like so much standard moviemaking hokum -- the sort of thing people have been enjoying in Hollywood movies for a century now -- becomes so much richer, deeper, and, yes, truer.

Watching Steve McQueen vroom around on that motorcycle at the end of "The Great Escape" is cool and fun and certainly memorable, but so much of what makes it cool and fun and memorable is its patent phoniness. Yes, "The Great Escape" is based on an actual event, but about as loosely as, say, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor" is.

Bresson's fidelity to verisimilitude is such that he even shot "A Man Escaped" in the prison the actual escape took place from. Not that a viewer needs to know this, or that Bresson himself spent a year in a German prison camp, to feel the movie's overwhelming weight of existential authority. It's simply there, in every shot. That's owing to Bresson's artistry, of course, but that artistry rests on a scaffolding of historical veracity. "Can we be sure of anything here?" Fontaine, the prisoner, wonders aloud. He can't, but we can -- and that sureness is wonderfully liberating for Bresson. Out of such scrupulous adherence to what was real comes a purity utterly alien to anything found in daily life yet absolutely fundamental to the greatness of Bresson's art. Knowing that we can believe frees us to feel and be moved as happens with few other movies.

The sad (and sadly banal) corollary of this relationship between fact and fiction in "A Man Escaped" is the relationship between fiction and fact in documentary reenactments. A documentary, by definition, is about something that we know, or can safely assume, actually happened. A reenactment shows something we know could not have been filmed -- either because moving pictures had yet to be invented, cameras could not have been present, or some other reason ruling out the possible existence of any film footage. Where Bresson honors the intelligence of his viewers with such exacting attention to what happened, reenactments present the reverse. They insult their viewers by showing them what viewers know cannot be shown. Actually, "insult" may not be the right word. The popularity of reenactments suggests that viewers don't so much feel insulted as reassured or entertained. "Ah, if we can see it, it must be true -- or at least it won't bore us." It's the aesthetic triumph of truthiness. How long before the History Channel decides to remake "A Man Escaped" and make Stephen Colbert the lead? They could make the prison Guantanamo.