The title of “A Woman Escapes” refers to Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate but sometimes reserved letter film is about a more contemporary moment in Paris, where a woman named Audrey comes to terms with the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she records correspondence that becomes lifelines from the grief and creative block she feels.
Her video and audio exchanges were created by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik, and Blake Williams. The medium is part of the message here, too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ preferences — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3D.
The result joins a long line of films featuring personal correspondence, this one tinged with the “stuck” feel of the isolating, screen-heavy parts of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) wanders around the apartment, pecking at her laptop, but the video letters can fling us out – to the Istanbul area, for example, via Cevik’s messages (including his useless exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps).
Unforgettable in the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.”, Campbell gives a more inward performance that evokes the thoughtful focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz (“MS Slavic 7”), but tempered here by a stay-in-bed mood. of withdrawal. Her Audrey does nothing less than create a kind of community through voice and image.
A woman escapes
Not judged. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theatres.