Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

Umbrella Entertainment

R4 DVD

B & W

French with English subtitles

Critics have gone into orgasms of analysis over this film, but leaving aside that it was made by legendary French director Robert Bresson, what is it really like? After all, we watch films for entertainment.

The film follows the life of a young girl growing up in a rather brutal French farming town. It is parallelled by the life of a donkey, Balthazar, that she christened as a child. Marie, the rather attractive but passive girl, is treated with a certain contempt by the villagers. She seems to have no control over her own life. She eventually seeks comfort with Gerard, a local delinquent who heads a small gang of petty thugs who are destined to become gangsters. She is treated with utter contempt by Gerard, and the villagers feel the same way about her for hanging around with him. In his few encounters with Balthazar he shows a cruel streak to animals that is reflected in the way he treats Marie. As the donkey grows up it, too, is treated harshly by a succession of masters. Like Marie, it has no control over its own life.

We follow the lives of the villagers but, like the donkey, we can’t form any attachment to them – they are mostly strangers devoid of personality, flat, ugly and cruel. The donkey tolerates his life stoically. Occasionally his ownership passes back to Marie and she generally treats him well but he is also being “borrowed” by Gerard to aid him in his new venture, smuggling. We can see the donkey being dragged further and further down, just like the people around him. The people don’t care for their animals, though – their lives are, in many ways, as flat and harsh as that of the donkey.

The film is disjointed in places with significant parts of the story left out. This makes it hard to follow sometimes and you have to do some mental gymnastics to work out what happened. Artistic it may be, but it’s also a pain in the a**e. In spite of this it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Balthazar. That sympathy does not flow on to the other characters, though. In their personality-deficient manner we are probably seeing them as the donkey does – occasional moments of kindness but a lot of ignorant cruelty.

I liked the story. I liked the donkey. I didn’t like the people. Bresson seems to have suppressed any remnant of humanity in them. He couldn’t have done a better character assassination job on rural French villagers if he had tried.

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