Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

Oh boy, direction by Robert Bresson again. This time I felt an obligation to watch because it's his most popular work. In fact, it was the highest among the British Film Institute's faves that I hadn't already seen. But that's not very promising to me. Well, at worst, it would be only 95 minutes I wasn't getting back.

Three child siblings adopt a donkey and name him Balthazar. When their family runs into trouble years later, they have to sell him. He has several owners after that, none of them kind. Meanwhile, one of the kids he knew, Marie (played in young adulthood by Anne Wiazemsky), against the advice of others, enters an abusive relationship with delinquent Gérard (François Lafarge), one of his owners. The film focuses about half the time on Balthazar and half on Marie, tho they do share a number of scenes.

Netflix calls the story a religious fable. There are a few overtly religious elements, such as Balthazar's baptism. I learned later that Bresson reported inspiration from a passage in The Idiot and can be divided according to representations of the deadly sins. But as the included documentary short notes, Bresson was more about using Catholic iconography than preaching. Don't get the idea of a morality play; you'll find almost no justice for the good characters or the bad.

I mentioned before that Bresson chose "models" rather than actors. Little did I know that even the donkey would be largely untrained, the count-stomping trick notwithstanding. And frankly, despite some credit to Wiazemsky, the humans don't emote much more than the donkey.

Nor do they talk much more than the donkey. I estimate about ten minutes of dialog all told, increasing my mental connection between Bresson and Vampyr. And for all the times he gets beaten (hope it wasn't as bad in reality as it looked), Balthazar rarely brays.

This may be the single most polarizing feature I've ever reviewed, even just among elitist critics. The vast majority of them love it, but then you have artsy types like Ingmar Bergman getting nothing out of it. There's no obvious way to tell whether you'll be empathetically taken in by the poignancy of the piece or find it soporific.

For my part, I shrug it off. It got me a little sad for both Marie and Balthazar, but I didn't see much to admire. When people call it Bresson's most complex effort, I feel as tho they might as well speak of Jim Davis' most complex comic strip. I still haven't acquired much of a taste for alleged depth in cinema.

I'll skip the companion piece, Mouchette, not that I ever planned to see it. If this is the best Bresson can do, I'm ending my experience of him here.