The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate yet sometimes reserved epistolary film centers on a more contemporary moment in Paris as a woman named Audrey processes the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that become lifelines out of the grief and creative block she’s feeling.
Her video and audio exchanges were made by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message here too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ predilections — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3-D.
The result joins a long lineage of personal-correspondence films, this one tinged with the “stuck” feeling of the isolating, screen-heavy stretches of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) putters about the apartment and pecks at work on her laptop, but the video letters can fling us outside — into the environs of Istanbul, for example, through Cevik’s missives (which include his idle exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps).
Campbell, unforgettable in the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” gives a more interior 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 enact a kind of communion through voice and image.
A Woman Escapes
Not rated. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters.
