Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar
by NATHAN GILMORE. Originally published in Issue #12.
A FILM WITH a dreadful vision of the world and the evil in it, but at the same time, we experience it with a kind of Christian mildness.” That was Jean-Luc Godard’s assessment of Robert Bresson’s 1966 masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar. Godard pronounced it “the world in an hour and a half." A perennial favorite for the title of one of the greatest movies of all time, the film and its director were popularly ignored when it debuted.
I certainly didn’t know or understand what I was encountering at first. I first heard the film mentioned in a vegetarian-themed podcast, where the host held it up as an eloquent reminder of humankind’s maltreatment of animals and a plea for a kinder ethic of nonhuman-human relations. Not an interpretation wholly without merit, but PETA-style propaganda this is not. As the critic J. Hoberman put it, Balthazar is a movie about a donkey in the way Moby Dick is about a whale.
Like all of Bresson’s films, Au Hasard Balthazar is a meditation on the theology of the ordinary, on the way that spirituality and the theological virtues intersect with everyday life, both secular and religious. Such concerns were fundamental to the entirety of Bresson’s artistic vision:
“There is the feeling that God is everywhere, and the more I live, the more I see that in nature, in the country. When I see a tree, I see that God exists. I try to catch and to convey the idea that we have a soul and that the soul is in contact with God. That's the first thing I want to get in my films.”
Roger Ebert called the film Bresson’s “finest prayer." Other Bresson films have been more dramatic, more exciting and more viscerally involving—for me, personally, A Man Escaped—but none more spiritually. Balthazar stands apart in its moral and spiritual rigor.
The film opens with a piano sonata. The entirety of the music is given space to play. The first sound made by vocal chords we hear is the strident braying of a donkey, breaking without explanation or apology the flow of Schubert’s music. The music resumes, unchanged. The unmelodious sound of an animal cry is heard apart from, yet not in opposition to the mellifluous movement of refined and studied music. Which then gives way to the clanging of cattle bells—reality goes inexorably on, interrupting ideas and ideals. The phrase “au hasard” in French means “at random," and indeed there’s a vignette quality to the film, episode after episode with little connective material. Shots are long and lingering, and characters move in and out of a fixed and steady frame.
The initial scene in which we meet Balthazar shows a young donkey suckling at his mother (mother and child) and a young boy insisting “let us have him”—reminiscent of “the Master needs him” in Luke’s Gospel account of the triumphal entry (Luke 19:31).
A group of children adopt him and Balthazar is playfully christened and baptized—a child’s cute fantasy, but meaningful. He is fed “the salt of wisdom." He submits to being handled by the children, rolling in the hay—but pulls away when they roughly hold him down. He does not play with the children, and they do not give him a separate dignity as an animal or come to see him as anything other than a live plaything. This is not an animal in the tradition of Charlotte’s Web, affable, interactive and nearly human in its intelligence. He is merely a donkey.
This is the first time he shall be treated by humans as anything other than a dumb beast, but it is very nearly the last time he is treated with anything like affection and love.
There is a sick child, who watches the other children but cannot play with them. She dies (would she have treated Balthazar differently?) and Balthazar is sent away. We see him next, years later, as a beast of burden, beaten, shoed, made to pull a cart. There are no lingering shots of his eyes to evoke a human emotion where there isn’t any. Balthazar behaves as a donkey, responding to pain, but wholly devoid of malice or self pity. Even after the cart he pulls overturns, he doesn’t run away, but simply trots off a short distance to graze in the grass.
IS THERE ANY creature so seemingly destined for labor as a donkey? The slanted eyes evoke a certain servile equanimity, an unwillingness to stare down the oppressor. The swinging of his head as the beast walks, suggesting a constant nod of acquiescence to whatever a natural order ordains as his fate. Balthazar's placidity, his silent acceptance of whatever befalls him, serves to throw the faults and failings of the humans around him into greater relief, his diffidence unfailing as they lie, drink, flirt with and are violent to one another.
Christ is called the lamb of God. The imagery, of course, bears deep resonance within the Judeo-Christian framework from which it grew. Here, however, we see the Christ-like attributes of a donkey—patient, long-suffering, mostly, though not always, in silence. Of course, Christ made his triumphal entry on the back of a donkey, but we hardly imagine that animal putting on airs because of it. That donkey would have known nothing of symbolism or theology, only of the weight of a human on his back.
Marie, the child Balthazar ends up with next, gives him a flower crown, but this tender gesture is followed by cruelty from others; he is then beaten—exactly as in Christ’s Passion, a crown followed by scorn. Balthazar is offered water from a wine bottle and refuses, as Christ did. The cruelties he endures he takes with silent dignity. The cruelty is meaningless, stupid, casual—but Bresson refuses to get hysterical over it. The movie often moves in silence. Reactions are made in the face, in a glance. In his silences, Balthazar throws the weight of the human actions around him into sharper relief: a young man’s careless lust, a young girl’s reserve and pride. These things happen in the donkey's world, but do not distract or engage him.
If this film had been made a very little later, or perhaps in the same era but by Walt Disney, Balthazar would have responded to his beating by bucking wildly, perhaps landing a kick or so at his tormentor, and run away as a fiddle and jaw harp made merry in the background. But that reaction would not be true of most donkeys, and it is certainly not true of Balthazar. Balthazar knows, in the mute way of a donkey, exactly what lot is his in life. He can feel pain, he may even feel fear, but he cannot rebel against his state, nor even reflect on his state. He knows only that he is.
For me, this is the most potent and least explainable of Balthazar's powers. The actors, down to the least-significant background character, play their roles, with a complete disinterestedness. Some might criticize the acting as wooden, especially now that Method acting has become the popular practice in filmmaking. But the reserve that each actor, both human and nonhuman, makes such an integral part of their role, is responsible for the bulk of the movie’s effect. When the character is removed from the movie, action and intention become paramount. Not that Bresson confines his characters to perfectly logical actions: Marie rejects the man who has loved her since childhood, but falls for the vain and shallow Girard. Girard is cruel and mistreats both Marie and Balthazar, but is handsome and glamorous and romantic with his leather jacket and motorbike. Love is not often, or even usually, a matter of logic. Yet here the viewer is forced to supply that logic. If a young girl acts illogically, we are made to consider the way a young girl acts. It is not given to us by the film by acting, or worse, overacting.
ROBERT BRESSON was decidedly not a director given to sentimentality or overacting. He was well known for demanding his cast members repeat a take over and over, until all emotion and artifice was drained, leaving only the mere action. Bresson’s seventh film is a master example of this method. The first several viewings of the film are done with removed interest, not least because Bresson intentionally distances us from his characters, who act only in the barest sense. They perform a role only in order to present us with the mere facts of the story. They move and speak, but they do so almost liturgically; the preordained motions and words are ever in service to the deeper truth of the ritual.
But in Bresson’s removal of the element of emotions, Girard’s cruelty stands alone, his selfishness is his own. Balthazar is no rival to Girard, except in Girard’s selfish mind. It is the warped workings of human nature that drag a mere donkey into such petty affairs of love and lust. In one scene, Girard and Marie are sitting in the car and Girard makes a crude pass at her. Marie runs from him and he pursues her, his path blocked by the body of the donkey. Balthazar is not protecting her; he is simply caught in their private drama, literally stuck in the middle of it. When Marie rejects her childhood crush, drained by false love after false love, she can still feel tenderness and affection for Balthazar: “I’ll love him."
We understand why Balthazar is so unemotional—he is a beast. Why does Bresson have his actors adopt the same flat affect? The effect is deliberately calculated. “The difficulty," Bresson said,
“is that all art is both abstract and suggestive at the same time. You can’t show everything. If you do, it’s no longer art. Art lies in suggestion. The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a constant state of anticipation.”
And we, the audience, supply the emotion. I found myself interacting with the action onscreen, muttering imprecations at Girard. Reacting, even when Balthazar or Marie didn’t. I think part of the reason is that the world that Bresson’s humans inhabit is essentially the same as the one his beasts do. The animals face the realities of human cruelty, but the cruel characters in Au Hasard Balthazar are cruel to humans and nonhumans alike. Even then, Balthazar stands alone. Paraded before the animals of the circus he ends up in, they meet his gaze—a chimp, an elephant, a tiger, a polar bear—but remain aloof, distant and separated. Given the time we have had with the character of Balthazar, would we eventually see these creatures as we see Balthazar: moral and emotional agents, worthy of pity, and thus, of a kind of love?
LIKE BRESSON'S’s earlier film, A Man Escaped, Balthazar is not as much about triumph as it is about survival. Many of the characters are not in control of their lives or their fates; their fates only reveal their essential characters. “Reality is different...I’ve no more tenderness, no heart," says Marie. Balthazar has lost none of his heart, because he has always accepted reality as it is. He has never been made sentimental about life, and life never gives him anything to be sentimental about. Balthazar, the most abused and powerless character in the film, is also the least warped by life’s cruelties.
Near the end, Balthazar's face is shown in close up. He bears on his back a load of stolen contraband—bearing the weight of human sin, recalling the sacrifice of another, who had Himself been borne on the back of a donkey. Yet, Balthazar's animal innocence remains: he blinks, and his head wobbles, as if he doesn’t understand. There has been much in his short, beleaguered life that he has not understood. Maybe that alone has made it bearable.
