Tweet

Le Trou was Becker’s final film (he died a month before its release). Made three years after Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1957), the film is in many ways a secular response to that film. Grimly realistic, fittingly claustrophobic, Le Trou it is based on the novel by José Giovanni (published in the iconic Série Noire collection in 1957). Giovanni was a one-time resistance fighter who had been condemned to death but was then pardoned before mounting a fruitful artistic career as novelist, screenwriter and director (he scripted, amongst others, Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle).

Faithful to the source novel, Becker’s film – whose main cast is made up largely of non-professionals – employs a quasi-documentary approach and takes place over a period of six days as four inmates at La Sante prison, each awaiting sentencing, attempt to dig their way out. However, before they can put their scheme in motion, they are joined by a fifth inmate whose presence may put an end to plans for escape. A wonderful, palm-sweating thriller.

 

Pasquale Iannone on 12th July 2007
View all 52 of Pasquale Iannone's reviews