Au Hasard, Balthazar

I won’t deny that Robert Bresson is a great director, a distinctive cinematic genius, but to me all his films feel like prison or monastic cells and the only one that makes my pantheon is the prison break film, A Man Escaped. Strangely enough, it was my “Donkey Man” friend, Kevin O’Hara, who led me back to this film. On tour promoting his memoir of an epic Irish travel adventure, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, he had been recommended to see this film where the title character is a donkey. So when Criterion Collection brought out its beautifully restored version of Au Hasard, Balthazar, I queued it up on Netflix. Having watched it again myself, I will pass it on to KO, and I will be amused to see his reaction to something so far out of his normal range of viewing. Will it strike him as bizarrely stilted, so strange in its rhythms and what the camera chooses to look at, more often the characters’ feet than their faces? Or will he just be looking at the donkey, and weeping for its fate, and the fate of sinful humanity? Is Bresson strictly a refined and sophisticated taste, or might he appeal to the cinematically naive in his pared down simplicity of portrayal? Very much the French intellectual, theorizing his practice, Bresson makes an impressive appearance in an interview included as an extra on the Criterion disk. With his abhorrence of “acting,” Bresson eschews the emotive aspects of most movies, and relies on ratiocination to achieve his chaste emotional effects. With his films more than most, you get out what you bring to it. So if you’re looking to confirm your feeling that the world is a bad and sad place, and that people are the worst thing in it, this might be just your film. Or if you take the donkey’s life to be a sentimental paradigm of saintly suffering. But if you want to be amused and engaged by the character of a donkey, turn to Kevin’s story of his journey with Missie around the entire coast of Ireland. (1966, dvd, n.) *6*