‘A Woman Escapes’ Review: Screen Sharing

The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 basic “A Man Escaped” a few French Resistance fighter in a Nazi jail in Lyon. This intimate but typically reserved epistolary movie facilities on a extra up to date second in Paris as a girl named Audrey processes the dying of an in depth buddy. During what seems like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that develop into lifelines out of the grief and artistic block she’s feeling.

Her video and audio exchanges had been made by the movie’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message right here too, because the visible textures fluctuate in response to the administrators’ predilections — 16-millimeter movie, high-definition video, even 3-D.

The outcome joins an extended lineage of personal-correspondence movies, this one tinged with the “stuck” feeling of the isolating, screen-heavy stretches of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) putters concerning the house and pecks at work on her laptop computer, however the video letters can fling us exterior — into the environs of Istanbul, for instance, by way of Cevik’s missives — and embrace Williams’s exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps.

Campbell, unforgettable within the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” provides a extra inside efficiency that evokes the considerate focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz (“MS Slavic 7”), however tempered right here by a stay-in-bed temper of withdrawal. Her Audrey does nothing lower than enact a type of communion by way of voice and picture.

A Woman Escapes
Not rated. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters.