Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Written and directed by Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson was not a part of the French New Wave. He was in his fifties by the time Godard, Truffaut, and company started their cinematic revolution. Bresson is a reminder that French films were already doing things far differently from their Hollywood counterparts. When you watch a Bresson film, you might feel a distance from yourself and his characters, which can be misinterpreted as “coldness.” To understand Bresson and his work, you need to know of his three primary influences: His Catholic upbringing, his time as a prisoner of war, and his love of art, particularly painting. He was never interested in filmmaking as a way to create great wealth, though he lived comfortably his whole life. Instead, film was the most apt means for the director to express his thoughts about the human condition.
At a French country farm near the Pyrenees, a baby donkey is adopted by a group of siblings. Jacques, the brother, leads a baptismal ceremony for the animal whom they name Balthazar. Jacques also has a sweetheart, young Marie, but their childhood romance dissolves when one of his sisters dies, and the family leaves to escape the tragic memories. Marie’s father, the local school teacher, takes over the land. Balthazar is given to nearby farmhands who work the animal so hard it runs away. The donkey finds Marie, who is now a teenager and doesn’t want to leave her side. Gerard, the local gang leader, is jealous of this animal because he wants Marie, who detests him. He responds by being intensely cruel to Balthazar, torturing the animal whenever he gets the chance. Both the animal & girl find themselves going down a path from which they have little choice, made objects of violence by the world, which seems to see no value in either.
Jean-Luc Godard said that Au Hasard Balthazar “sums up the world.” But what did he mean by that? This film methodically shows the complexity of the world and the inherent suffering that seems to come with existing in it. This is not a story where good triumphs over evil. Instead, it is a tale about how the vulnerable are often broken down until they die by the powerful. It’s not an easy watch, nor is it particularly gruesome in what it shows. Like all of Bresson’s work, it is straightforward and more to the point than what we might typically associate with narrative cinema, so moments resemble a documentary more than a story.
Balthazar is utterly helpless in these situations. He cannot speak; thus, he cannot argue for himself. He cannot fight in the same way people fight, so he takes their blows with little he can do. The donkey is a domesticated creature, so he can’t stray too far from humans, or he puts his survival at risk. The girl who loves him is also the subject of tremendous brutality, especially by the young men in the village. Ultimately, the audience and Balthazar are one and the same. We are powerless to do anything. We can only observe the passage of time and these cruel acts.
Bresson is very interested in creating modern-day fables & parables. This explains why non-actors often play his characters, and he does little to coach them as performers. He puts them in scenes and has them act the scene out. Each frame is filled with such intentional elements of composition from the production design to lighting to cinematography. People more familiar with U.S. cinema might find these movies “lifeless” because characters are not over-emoting, but that would detract from the purity of the story. Bresson has no interest in overcomplicating his work; he seeks for it to be so clear that anyone can understand it.
What’s being presented here is a connection between animals and humans. While humans are clearly different in many ways from our animal brethren, we are still connected to and are one of them. This brings up the concept of free will. Are we an animal simply subject to a life of misery, some of us born into comfort and others toil? Is there a grander purpose to this suffering? Bresson admired the Catholic saints as martyrs and found beauty in enduring such pain. Our heart breaks for Balthazar, yet we find beauty in the composition of these images because they speak to a core aspect of being alive. It is beautiful to see the truth of life reflected in cinema; films’ primary purpose is to exist.
In contemporary cinema, particularly what comes from Hollywood, people are fed images of inauthentic self-empowerment. There’s nothing wrong with presenting life from a positive perspective, but U.S. cinema often delivers a warped, distorted picture of life under the label of “escapism.” What happens when nearly all of a society’s popular media output becomes “escapist”? What happens when real life is no longer present on our screens? Look at any sitcom on television and see if it reflects the economic reality of anyone you know? How often do we see television characters stressing over bills? How frequently does random tragedy strike these figures? The purpose of such media is to create a false narrative of the culture it is presented to, to reassure them that while others beyond our borders may be suffering, you don’t have anything to worry about.
We’ve become used to characters behaving with detached irony or overly maudlin sentiment. It’s reflective of the very extreme manic-depressive psyche of people in the States. Art has become all consumed by entertainment, so it no longer serves the purpose it was created for. Art can be entertainment, but it can also be educational, philosophical, informative, moving, etc. Capitalism aims to make as much money from offering people things they desire as possible. Art that puts the viewer in an uncomfortable state is often not profitable, especially in a culture where people have been taught that their moment-to-moment pleasure through consumption is of the highest importance. That is when they aren’t slaving away to generate wealth for someone else. If we are not regularly engaging with art that makes us uncomfortable, we cannot grow as people. Discomfort is one of the critical aspects of learning, and the States has become a place where everyone is numbed to their discomfort because if they were given time to dwell on it, they might do something about it.
Au Hasard Balthazar should make you feel something, even if all you feel is discomfort. That is still good because most of what you see in your local Cineplex or on Netflix is intended to numb you to your existence. If someone absolutely hates a piece of art, that’s not bad; they have felt something. It is bad when you hate a piece of art and leave it at that when you refuse to articulate why. In that articulation, you grow and you learn. Sometimes, you realize you do not hate the art; instead, you hate what the artist asks you to examine.
You have one life, and few have it without difficulties. It is a boon that we have artists like Robert Bresson who have left bodies of work behind in the short time they were on this planet. These art pieces tell us what the artist observed in their existence, and they can often guide us to see more than we typically do. We are Marie. We are Balthazar. For most of our lives, bad things happen to us, and there is little we can do. It could be the direct actions of others on an intimate or global scale. It could be happenstance; we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bresson doesn’t wish to hide that away as unpleasant but to see if there is beauty in being alive. Balthazar’s life may have been sad, but it would be hard to argue that he was not an infinitely more beautiful soul than the humans who oppressed him.
PopCult Reviews 