Au hasard Balthazar

During the nineteenth century ,the comtesse de Segur wrote a novel for the children called "memoirs of a donkey" .A very pious writer,she chose the donkey as a symbol of humility...as Robert Bresson did I suppose.The very first pictures of the movie,with the children,"christening" the donkey ,might be a nod to the writer whom the young Bresson,like all his generation must have read when he was a young boy."Au hasard Balthazar " is an updated version of "les memoires d'un ane" ,but a very austere story:although Bresson's work enjoys a very high rating on the site,I must say that it's not for all tastes.I cannot imagine,say, a "matrix" fan getting enthusiastic about it.

Bresson's actors are non -professionals -with the exception of Anne Wiazemski,but it was her debut;then she became the par excellence intellectual actress,for the likes of Godard,Tanner and Garrel,all directors that easily make me yawn my head off-,but do not expect a "natural "performance.I hope the non-French speaking who wrote a comment saw the movie in French with English subtitles.Dubbed in another language ,Bresson's works lose a lot of their originality.Because the actors speak in a distant voice,in a neutral style as if they were reciting Descartes's "the Discourse on Method".They never show any emotion,even through their darkest hour (not even after the heroine's rape).

Bresson films his human characters as if they were Martians ,and his sympathy for the donkey is the only pity he has to give us.This beast of burden seems to carry on its back all the sins of the world,and his route is a calvary.A woman says "this donkey is a saint" .

Bresson showed us the Beast in Man and the Man in Beast.

This is a very important film. It makes you look into yourself and examine your own worth.

The world is not a fair place to live in. It has its own social structures and with each their is a certain perception of worth. Robert Bresson displays these perceptions from the bottom up.

Much like Vittorio DeSica's Umberto D, this film intertwines the relationship between man and beast. But who is the beast? It's society.

With images shot in crisp black and white Robert Bresson reveals the sordidness of the human soul, how cruel, selfish, pathetic, and unjust it can be. Au Hasard Balthazar is not an easy film to watch, but its honesty and approach towards society's injustices make it a must see.

It took me years to track down a video copy of this rare film. It was definitely worth searching for. It's my favorite of Bresson's films. A very intense and dark drama about the quality of human and animal life on the face of the earth. This film will definitely bring you to your knees.

Maybe I'm not as completely overwhelmed with the work of the immensely revered director Robert Bresson as others are, and I almost wish I was more so. I do know from the other films I have seen of his- Pickpocket and A Man Escaped- that he is one of the superior craftsmen of his time in France, a veritable storyteller with a very precise, original craftsmanship and way about telling his stories that shows compromise is nowhere in sight. However I don't think, try as I might (and I do love other films that do evoke religious connotations and metaphors like with Dreyer and Rossellini's films, which perhaps aren't as heavy-handed), to soak into all of the allegory of it all.

When it comes down to it, Au hasard Balthazar is a kind of fable, and it is successful even as some of the Christian connections are lost on me. It is strongest at being a dramatic look at two lives where drama doesn't need to be put to highest heights or given a shot of adrenaline. There's almost something very worn down about the characters- as well as the donkey Balthazar- that is the best part of what Bresson does try to draw parallels to. His direction might be un-easy to get along with, but it is rewarding in a cathartic way too.

Much has been written about Balthazar being a kind of saintly figure, or Jesus, who suffers all of his life and then at the end dies a sorrowful death for, perhaps, everyone else's sins. But if that side of reading into it isn't really suiting, and you're looking for just a really well-told story (which is really all a fable can do), the donkey's- and Marie's (Anne Wiazemesky) story does take on a neo-realist side to it too. It's the everyday things that count in this world, and act as burdens that don't give people the kind of life and enjoyment they could have.

While Bresson maybe doesn't have his great strengths in much of the dialog, his direction of the actors, which involved multiple takes to the point of (as with the donkey) beating the life out of it, is quite unique. Like with Pickpocket, you can tell something is so suppressed with them, even with the careless young man who Marie falls in love with- and later leaves- and the unfortunate drunk who 'takes care of Balthazar for a while, that it's no wonder nothing happy ever really comes to any of them. Also, the body language is so distinct and powerful that it really makes the uncomplicated nature of the photography and editing work that much more so. Turn the sound off and it might not even make a difference (what with lack of music)

Two of my favorite scenes might likely be two of the best scenes I've ever seen from the few Bresson films I've seen. One is when Balthazar has a brief stint in a circus, and it's interesting to see how the simplistic nature of the story reaches, for once, an almost ironically amusing point in this scene. For a moment you're pulled into that illusion of a Disney movie- where an animal is meant to be more like us, but then once reality comes back in it wipes that all away. The other scene is during a dance in a bar, where everyone's bopping away to a jazz song, and the young man mentioned before, throws bottles and causes a ruckus, but no one seems to stop dancing at all.

Are they too, who should be having a good time, that numbed by their lives to not be shook up by the disturbances around them? It is a film that really does get you thinking once it ends, about how small-town society treats things in very set ways that make some like Marie want to just get out. There's an undercurrent in the story of money being an integral- and hurtful- part of the world, where pride and suffering gets mixed up in it too. But most striking when watching the film are the scenes with the donkey, who punctuates the un-wavering methods of those around him (who very rarely are actually kind and happy around him, aside from the kids early on). These scenes display Bresson utilizing his storytelling and skills with poignancy that, if you can identify with the innocent(s) of the story, is kind of mind-blowing.

Even if the film is possibly imperfect, it nevertheless left me feeling I had seen something special. Few filmmakers can get away today with putting together a tragic story and pulling parallels between a worker animal and a misguided young woman and how others out there try to live every day. It's a brave movie more often than not that might hit (and has hit) other viewers both young and old alike. Grade: A

To read through most reviews of Balthazar feels like having stepped inside a church with people sighing about god and transcendence, which is a testament to Bresson's power here in his most spiritual work so far. But let me step outside in clear air for a moment.

It was an ongoing project for him, striving for an ascetic eye that purifies. He had began (essentially) with Diary of a Priest, ambitious work about a spiritual journey. But I believe he was troubled by a few things in it, if his next films offer any clue.

He spent the next couple of films completely muting the emotional turmoil evident in Diary, taking all the romanticism out, making them purely about the desire to break free from a prison-world. Pickpocket and Jeanne D'Arc were sketches in that austere direction. But this was setting him down a disastrous path where the only thing purer was was just more and more bare. When does fasting become starving and why is a stone floor purer than a furnished house?

How about we say that his desire to evoke the abstract was laudable, but his dogmatic way of doing it absolutely killed the world in which it lives and hides? His camera murders it. It only managed to take the pure out of life and make a liturgy around its dead body. It was destroying the possibility for cinematic space to support metaphor, inner life, poetry, and to simply be anything other than dead nature. The process of facts alone won't do, they can never convey life, much less pure life.

So I had my sights set on Balthazar as his most pure, most lauded, and expected perhaps to mount a critique of a spirituality that is only its own funeral. But I believe he beat me to the punch. I believe he began to see that he was starving himself, at least so far as the film is different from before.

This is his most lush, his most ambitious since Diary (none of the interim were), his most accomplished and with the most life. His camera doesn't just stare, it moves again and searches. He doesn't just create ellipsis within a scene, he makes it move across the narrative.

A household collapses, but we move to see this in the girl's disastrous relationship with a despicable bully, and we experience the loss of innocence, the fouling of kindness in her world, in Balthazar's treatment at the hands of several callous owners.

At the center Bresson has the most placid, most unassuming actor, a selfless being. It's by reading what we do in Balthazar's eyes that we color the whole and it ripples through and becomes ours. We have the reactions he doesn't and thus humanize ourselves. It's marvelous and it plumbs into something fundamental about how the world is put together that makes it worthy beyond technique.

See, life will break down, sometimes for no other reason than someone changed his mind about a deal and pride. It will break and scatter in pieces, go through the cycle of suffering. The film ends with everything broken, nothing put back together, the girl having left off for a next life somewhere.

What it plumbs is that what we see into these makes a difference. There's abandonment at the end, heartbreak, anonymous loss of a soul that we knew as dear. But I would rather see courage myself. Instead of projecting our human terror into him, take from his capacity to endure. If suffering isn't pain, it's not being able to abide pain; how about there is nothing lost, nothing broken, there is only a time for things to come together and a time to disperse again? Balthazar isn't lost, he has returned, or so it goes maybe.