In a Paris prison cell, five inmates use every ounce of their tenacity and ingenuity in an elaborate attempt to tunnel to freedom. Based on the novel by José Giovanni, Jacques Becker’s Le trou (The Hole) balances lyrical humanism with a tense, unshakable air of imminent danger
Le Trou, Jacques Becker’s last film, is undoubtedly the director’s best work and was hailed at the time (particularly by the New Wave directors such as François Truffaut) as a masterpiece. Today, it remains a compelling film, superbly directed and photographed with a remarkable attention to detail.
The film bears some similarity to Robert Bresson’s 1956 film Un condamné à mort s’est échappé in that both describe an arduous and meticulously detailed attempt to escape from a prison. However, whereas Bresson’s film is more a spiritual work, a study in faith and redemption, Becker’s film is anchored in grim reality. The romantic artifice in Bresson’s film is entirely absent here. Becker concentrates entirely on the physical and mental ordeal and offers us one of the most gruelling cinema experiences. His protagonists are very much flesh and blood mortal beings, not just humbled by their predicament, but totally humiliated. The desire to escape is not a question of life and death, as it is in Bresson’s film. Here, it is driven simply by the need to be free of a soul-destroying regime which treats its prisoners like animals.
The most striking difference between Bresson’s film and Becker’s Le Trou is the brutal realism in the latter. In the desperate relentless pounding of iron against stone which dominates our senses when the prisoners attempt to break out of their prison, it is virtually impossible not to share their frustration, their pain, their optimism. You can clearly imagine the sweat on their backs and the blisters on their hands, and each time a fragment of stone crumbles away, you are grateful and cheered, as if you were one of the escaping prisoners. Becker’s realism not only creates a stunningly compelling film, but it really does manage to involve the audience in his story, achieving the closest thing to virtual reality in traditional cinema.
To add to the feeling of realism, Becker uses non-professional actors and the film has not one note of music in it. His direction is masterful in this, his most suspense-filled film. The film is loosely based on the experiences of thriller writer José Giovanni, who was himself involved in an attempted break-out from the Santé Prison. As in many of the films he subsequently directed, Giovanni’s personal insight brings a gritty verisimilitude to heighten the film’s dramatic impact and sense of realism. One of the cellmates involved in Giovanni’s real-life prison break-out, Jean Keraudy, even had a starring role in this film.
