Joseph Pezzuto "You must forgive. Everyone. Much will be forgiven you. You have suffered." One of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson's acclaimed Au Hasard Balthazar is a film that follows the story of a sensitive farm girl named Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) and her cherished donkey, Balthazar. This would be the sister film of Bresson's next picture Mouchette. Marie and Balthazar are eventually separated when she gets older, the tale follows both the young woman and the donkey as both contend with the hardships of the world. Although Marie and Balthazar often encounter cruelty from various people they encounter, they also discover small moments of beauty. We have seen many times in movies those seeking/finding redemption or offering some sort of sacrifice for a cause far greater than themselves. But what if these actions were performed through the titular farmyard animal lead? Does it work? Let's take a look.We first see Balthazar as a newborn as he takes his first unsteady steps. This is a slight metaphor for the rest of the film. Three children sprinkle water on its head and baptize it. Unbeknownst to the little colt, he will be owned by many of the locals and be returned to some of them more than once, some kind, others cruel. Balthazar's first owner is Marie, of whom lives with her parents; her mother (Nathalie Joyaut) and father (Philippe Asselin, the local schoolmaster). Her playmate is Jacques (Walter Green), of whom agrees will marry the girl someday. When Jacque's mother dies, his grief-stricken father leaves the district, entrusting his farm to Marie's father, in whom he has complete trust. Marie has an immediate connection with Balthazar, happily decorating his bridle with wild flowers. However she does nothing to protect the animal when a local gang of boys torment the him. The leader is Gerard (François Lafarge), the son of the local baker.As the years pass, Marie grows up and the pair become separated. We see, though, how the film traces both of their fates as they both embark on parallel sojourns, continually taking abuse of all forms from the people they come across. Balthazar has several owners, as most exploit him, some times more with brutality than love. Both even suffer at the hands of the same people. How can one not feel for the beloved beast of burden with the white-spotted face, long fuzzy ears and big black eyes? We empathize his sense of the cold when we see the snow on his fur; his sense of pain and alarm when his tail is set ablaze for refusing to move; his satisfaction and contentment when he eats; his ridicule when trained to count math equations at a circus; the worn look in his eyes and weary feeling in his legs when overworked with heavy loads by ruthless masters. We unfortunately see Gerard again when his father purchases the burro to carry bread. The boy tortures the donkey as he tries in another scene to get close to Marie. In the end, Marie's fate remains unresolved whereas the donkey's is clear. Balthazar, now older and worn, one day aimlessly wanders into an open field. A herd of sheep surround him as he lays down, braying as a final sacrament before he passess on.Bresson said that he wanted to make a different style of filmmaking using his theory of "pure cinema" after making several prison-themed films. Balthazar was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, as each episode in Balthazar's life represents one of the seven deadly sins. The film was "made up of many lines that intersect one another", Bresson later stated, and that Balthazar was meant to be a symbol of the Christian faith. Bresson was known for casting unknown actors, which gave his films more layers of depth and humanity on a level many other filmmakers rarely capture. Wiazemsky's 2007 book Jeune Filleon tells of her experiences during filming Balthazar, regarding how she and Bresson developed a close relationship during shooting, although it was not consummated, and how she lost her virginity to a member of the film's crew. Critics and film reviewers widely praised Balthazar, including the noted filmmaker of the French New Wave and Cahiers du Cinema critic Jean- Luc Godard, of whom eventually went on to marry Wiazemsky. Imbued with religious imagery, spiritual allegories, shot with a naturalistic, minimalist aesthetic style and a study on saintliness, Balthazar contains a powerful spiritual message that is both revolutionary as it is rewarding.

chaos-rampant 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.

gavin6942 The story of a mistreated donkey and the people around him. A study on saintliness and a sister piece to Bresson's Mouchette.Bresson's best-known film is "Pickpocket", and it happens to be among the best films ever made (they say all French cinema after that owes its existence to Bresson, and I suppose that has some truth to it). But I almost wonder if this is the overall better film (I think it is).Our main character is a donkey. Not a cartoon donkey or one with human voiceovers. Just a real, regular donkey. His story is told by the lives around him, but he seems to express emotions, too... he does not, of course -- donkeys cannot act. But Bresson finds a way to use the donkey as a reflection on the world around him.

Howard Schumann In Balthazar, a donkey is a silent witness to the cruelty and indifference of human beings as he is passed from one owner to the other. Suffering is his lot in life, a suffering that is mirrored in the life of his original owner, young Marie, whose innocence is trampled on and abused by a young man to whom she has given herself unselfishly.It is from that suffering, however, that grace is revealed and shown without adornment in a concluding scene of simple, yet profound beauty. Bresson himself describes this most eloquently: ". . . the more life is what it is - ordinary, simple, without pronouncing the word 'God' - the more I see the presence of God in that." To Bresson, sainthood is available to all, even to the most debased creatures.