You don't have to be an animal lover to appreciate Robert Bresson's donkey movie, but it probably doesn't hurt. I have a feeling anyway that might be a significant piece of the huge wallop it manages to deliver for me. But this one moves in mysterious ways. I only saw it for the first time a year or two ago but have been in thrall to it since. The title doesn't translate to English well—roughly, it appears to mean "Balthazar by happenstance," Balthazar being the donkey. Accordingly, it's about as episodic in its brief running time as it can be, moving fitfully and elliptically across the life of the donkey from its early life as a colt adopted by a provincial family as a pet until its death many years later. The people in this picture responsible for it or involved with it figure large as well, notably the young girl who first cared for it, Marie. All of them tend to be weak or cruel or both, tragically so.
I also don't think you have to be Catholic to appreciate it, an overlay that I take as a bit of a red herring and mostly beside the point. I haven't seen much Bresson because of the heavily Catholic allegorical interpretations so often made of his work (which admittedly can be hard to get away from, as in the other title of his with which I'm familiar, Diary of a Country Priest). To be blunt about it and attempt to dispose the thread, Balthazar's story does not seem to me to remotely resemble the Jesus story, though some of the elements are there, as can be seen in the clips. In most ways I think it's almost naturalistic about the life of a beast of burden.
Bresson is altogether an odd filmmaker, another one whose work probably falls into the category of "slow." He was insistent about calling his cast members "models" rather than "actors," which signals something interesting to me about his approach. Balthazar also has a subtle and amazing sound design, evident even in the titles, which alternate between a Schubert piano sonata and, well, you'll see (hear). In the final sequence, which is devastating, the sounds of dogs barking, bells clanking, and the wind are utterly haunting. Bresson has always been a filmmaker easy for me to procrastinate seeing, but I'm looking forward now to making a project of catching up on a few others that sound promising, such as Pickpocket, Mouchette, and A Man Escaped.
Titles and opening
Final sequence
Phil #16: To Sir With Love (James Clavell, 1967) (scroll down)
Steven #16: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
More canon more or less, from me and from Steven. I have since caught up with Pickpocket and Mouchette, though not yet with A Man Escaped. I didn't warm a lot to Mouchette but I might try it again. Pickpocket has some great almost documentary-type footage of the titular activity, plus an intriguing take on Dostoevsky and a remarkably full-throated partisan in Paul Schrader, featured on the Criterion disc. A really good one overall and one I look forward to seeing again.
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