Classic Film: Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
I prefer to overlook style and form in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar to instead focus on its plot and message. Briefly, Bresson used non-professional actors and was known to do up to thirty takes per scene to deconstruct the lines until they became a natural part of the actor’s speech. All this was to imbue a sense of reality, of non-theatricality, to the film. I am less interested in whether or not this was achieved, as the final product is meant to make such production efforts transparent. Multiple extras on home releases have concocted meta-textual re-readings of the classic film. Papers have been written, opinions swayed, but the film remains unchanged.
The story revolves around two characters: Balthazar, a donkey, and Marie, a weak-willed girl who showed him compassion when she was young, and whose proceeding story tends to parallel the animal’s. Balthazar moves from owner to owner, a totality of experiences that exposes a general cruelty towards animals. They beat him when he doesn’t move, and one motorcycle punk even sets his tail on fire. This same, named Gérard, unsurprisingly sexually coerces Marie. Like Balthazar, she is quiet and submits to her cruel punishment. Her own father loses his land over a matter of pride to an adept capitalist who compounds the insult by likewise accepting sexual favours from Marie.
It must be noted that these various “sexual encounters” mentioned occur off-screen, and are assumed rather than bluntly visualized. We can easily infer these happen, especially from one occasion in which Gérard, post-coitus, smiles and quite literally blows his own horn.
My impression at film’s end was that the weak-willed and principled are used and wantonly discarded by the mean and corrupt. Gérard and his gang of punks, as well as the capitalist, end up quite unscathed, whilst Marie, her father and Balthazar meet piteous ends. Following Balthazar from one owner to the next, we know that every character that mistreats him is a prime candidate for the mistreatment of his fellow man, or woman. There is a sense in which the film is a tale of antiquity vs. modernity. Gérard loves radios and motorcycles and naturally considers the donkey a creature of a bygone era. Marie’s father’s virtues of “pride” and “principle” are similarly outdated in a world that favours ingenuity and cut-throat business.
Au hasard Balthazar is not a happy movie, but neither is the allegorical tale from which it is based. The Christian overtones have been discussed at length, and are definitely present. Marie, when first she meets the donkey Balthazar, baptizes him and then, like Mary Magdalene, plays the role of the prostitute. Balthazar takes his punishments and in the end is a sacrificial donkey surrounded by lambs. A moment later, the sheep run away and Balthazar lies alone in the field. Perhaps Bresson is pointing to Christianity as another lost element of antiquity, and that the sheep have moved on. Perhaps we too have moved on – we have become the tigers and polar bears Balthazar sees at the circus: ferociously individualistic.
andrescanella 