Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar is an original and poignant film, offering a portrait of humanity–and its discontents–seen through the life of a donkey.
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The Balthazar of the title is a donkey, born, like all human beings, to suffer needlessly and die mysteriously.
When asked, Bresson acknowledged that the inspiration for the film was the donkey anecdote in Dostoyevski’s “The Idiot.”
Au hasard Balthazar is a 1966 French drama about a donkey and his mistreatment as he’s passed to different owners.
The movie is effective for its unique aesthetic style, religious imagery, and spiritual allegories.
The treatment of the donkey ranges from brutal abuse by angry men to warm hug from lonely woman and children.
It is a deeply emotional film about the suffering in human experience, told simply through the eyes of a donkey.
In the end, the degree of empathy is left up to the individual viewers and their subjective readings of the various scenes.
With heightened awareness, we see each of the meager milestones of the donkey’s life. There’s both good and evil, choice and necessity, tenderness and cruelty, order and chaos, joy and sorrow. The episodic tale is told with fragmentation of framing that suits the material.
The donkey’s life interfaces with the lives of many of its owners, from small children in rural France to a girl who’s later raped and dies to her sadistic lover who tortures the animal. A brutal farmer owns and beats the donkey, but his own life ends in dark irony. After a chapter as a circus star, the donkey ends its life with a decent old man who considers the animal to be a saint.
The “actors” contribute the blank faces of one-shot non-professionals with no background in theatrical expression. Yet despite the bleak and austere elements, “Au Hasard Balthazar” is an extraordinarily touching and sensual film.
The music includes Franz Schubert’s “Piano Sonata No. 20.”
Au Hasard Balthazar Score:
IMDB Score: 7.8/10
Metacritic Score: 98/100
Our Grade: A (***** out of *****)
About Robert Bresson
Born September 25, 1907, Robert Bresson is considered to be one of the reclusive geniuses of the French cinema.
Bresson had wished to dissociate himself from his early film work, claiming that, as far as he was concerned, his career really began with the feature, “Les Anges du Peche” (1943)
Occupying a unique place in French cinema, Bresson cannot be classified with either the Old Guard or the New Wave. Which may be the reason why he is highly respected by both camps for pursuing a highly individual style unperturbed by the trendier or mainstream cinema around him.
Never a fashionable or popular filmmaker in his own country, Bresson favored a pristine, minimalist aesthetic approach, marked by the suppression of emotionalism and melodramatics on the one hand and the purity of style through austere compositions on the other.
Jean Cocteau once said: “Bresson expresses himself cinematographically as a poet would with his pen.”
Francois Truffaut: “His cinema is closer to painting than photography.”
He was a thought-provoking philosopher, equipped with a camera, an uncompromising Jansenist who was rigorously preoccupied with ideas of predestination and spiritual age.
Bresson was a complete cinema stylist whose universe remains unchanged from film to film, and whose personal signature is imprinted on each and every one.
Thus, of all French directors, Bresson probably comes closest to the definition of an auteur. His films are tightly constructed to the exclusion of all but the bare essence of the texts under exploration. What he chooses to show is presented with rigorous, almost fanatic, attention to detail.
Bresson has made only 13 features in 40 years, yet he is one of the most discussed and revered figures in world cinema–creative, original, unique.
He shared the Grand Prix de Creation at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival for “L’Argent,” which would become his final film.
Credits:
Directed, written by Robert Bresson
Produced by Mag Bodard
Cinematography Ghislain Cloquet
Edited by Raymond Lamy
Music by Jean Wiener
Distributed by Cinema Ventures
Release date: May 25, 1966
Running time: 95 minutes
