Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) follows a donkey named Balthazar as he moves from owner to owner, sometimes bought, sometimes stolen, sometimes discarded. Those in command of his life do various things to him, love some of the people in their lives, hate others, all with carefully expressionless faces. Eventually, the donkey is shot and dies, and the movie comes to an end.
The cinematography was excellent.
Now I’ve reviewed some other views of the film, and I see someone writing for Wikipedia states,
The story was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s The Idiot[3] and each episode in Balthazar’s life represents one of the seven deadly sins. Bresson later stated that the film was “made up of many lines that intersect one another” and that Balthazar was meant to be a symbol of Christian faith.
Oddly enough, I’ve been reading The Idiot for about a year, now.
As I’m not Christian and certainly have not drunk deeply of that mythology, I may not be well suited to be an audience for it. Nevertheless, I must continue to insist I detested the illogical actions of the characters, and their expressionless faces continue to bug me. Perhaps it really is a fabulous movie, but it doesn’t get my vote for Best of All Time. J. Hoberman, quoted in the Chicago Reader, criticizes people like me:
“To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago.”
The article’s author, Drew Hunt, is a bit nicer:
Such a statement is funny and ultimately true, but it also places an unnecessary burden on watching a Bresson film. Ultimately, they’re really not that difficult to parse. There’s a reason adjectives like “spiritual” and “humanist” and “transcendent” are used so often when talking about his work: it isn’t as important to “get” a Bresson film—or any film, for that matter—as it is to simply experience one.
But then Hunt insists that Au Hasard Balthazar is the best Bresson has produced:
Bresson’s richest and most profound film, a parable of sin and suffering that considers the human cost of spiritualism with Dostoevskian complexity. Plenty of hyperbole has been lobbed its way—Jean-Luc Godard said “Everyone who sees it will be absolutely astonished, because this film is really the world in an hour and a half,” and Andrew Sarris paradoxically claimed “It stands by itself as one of the loftiest pinnacles of artistically realized emotional experience”—but none of it feels unearned. This is one of a kind.
I just feel sorry for the donkey. If he’s the stand-in for Christianity, then it’s not that he’s annoyed by humanity – he’s bloody well dead. I suppose that he dies in the commission of a smuggling crime might be meaningful, but by the end of the movie I’m too tired to make fun of it.
