Year: 1966
Director: Robert Bresson
Stars: Anna Wiazemsky, François Lafarge, Pierre Klossowski
It’s been a bit of a tough week for me – one of my own making – and only because of quite a different film than the one featured here. I recently subscribed to BFIPlayer (anyone on the fence, just do it) and the service’s rich selection has encouraged me to tick off some of the big hitters of the classical canon that I’ve hitherto not had easy access to. Chief among these has been the intimidating shadow of Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour holocaust documentary Shoah, which I’ve been watching piecemeal all week. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, gargantuan and vital – particularly in contrast to our present times – but it’s also heavy, heavy material to wade through. I’ve learned things I don’t think I ever wanted to know about the Nazi death camps. I’ve had nightmares attributable to these discoveries.
At the time of writing I’m still not done (3 hours to go…), but my time with it this week prompted a re-watch of Robert Bresson’s austere masterpiece Au hasard Balthazar from 1966; a film that Jean-Luc Godard once praised as containing “the world in an hour and a half”. The movie’s svelte economy really bares Godard’s bold claim out. We travel with a lowly protagonist from birth to death in then-contemporary rural France, but our protagonist never utters a word, for he is that ultimate beast of burden; a donkey. Balthazar passes from owner to owner, frequently finding himself possessed by characters of immense weakness and cruelty, suffering in inscrutable silence the naked nature of man. Balthazar’s passivity reveals us as ugly creatures. He becomes a docile canvas upon which Bresson paints an unflattering portrait of our fallibility.
It is in this aspect that the film functions as a more artful, poetic counterpoint to the horrors catalogued at length in Shoah. Au hasard Balthazar is by no stretch of the imagination a Holocaust film, but it articulates – often without words – man’s capacity to normalise unspeakable evils.
Early in its episodic tale, a leather jacket sporting ruffian named Gérard (François Lafarge) sets his amorous sights on willowy farmgirl Marie (Anne Wiazemsky). Marie dotes upon her beloved Balthazar. She is his fairest, most favourable owner. She places kisses upon his nose, wreaths his head in flowers (the Christ-like connotations of this humble steed are many). Jealous of her affectionate turns toward a simple donkey, Gérard inflicts a dark punishment on him. When opportunity presents itself, Gérard ties a wad of paper to the animal’s tail and sets fire to it, causing Balthazar to panic. But the act is interrupted just before completion. A car approaches and Gérard is compelled to hide his matches, revealing the shame of his action. Without even showing his face, Bresson allows us to understand him completely. This simple beat in the picture tells so much. Of Gérard. Of human nature. Of the callous compartmentalisation of cruelty. It is so much easier to be wicked without witness.
Bresson’s filmmaking has long been praised for its stark economy. When watching one of his films one gets the sense of something that’s been whittled down to its most basic requirements. Whether in conception or in the editorial aftermath, there’s a sense that every shot has been considered for its necessity. Not a moment wasted. There may have been happy accidents in the process, but even their inclusion feels calculated. It’s precision that somehow doesn’t feel stiflingly precious.
In that decision making Bresson encounters and toys with innovation. There are shots and edits here that feel deliberately arch and leading. In a scene not long after Gérard’s attack on Balthazar, it is heavily insinuated that he sexually assaults Marie in a parked car. A shot of his hand rising up off of the car seat announces itself as unusual, both in framing and in the cutting. An ill-fitting piece of the movie’s patchwork that throws the entire scene off-kilter. What unfolds in the car feels almost as though it ought to come with a ‘scene missing’ intertitle. The continuity feels attacked, perhaps for the audience’s benefit. Through this simple, deliberate sabotaging of the scene’s pacing, we’re asked to fill in a blank that’s only ever inferred. Bresson shows himself a master of the implicit.
The director was no less formally rigorous elsewhere. Consider the similarly structured L’Argent, or Au hasard Balthazar‘s sister film of 1967, Mouchette. Yet neither of these films feel dear to me as this one does. The former doesn’t exhibit nearly the same depth of feeling, while the latter is a little too cruel and devastating. A Man Escaped is impressive in its utter commitment to subtraction, but it’s nowhere near as tender (at least, as held in memory).
Is it the unreadable black pools of its protagonist’s eyes? Is it how Wiazemsky’s own expressive countenance is inferred to act as translator for the donkey; a human reflection of something otherwise unknowable? Is it the sense that somehow Godard nailed it with his succinct summation? That somehow everything about us is catalogued in these clipped vignettes. Is it simply that it is art that moves me?
Such contemplation provokes a question that came to me this week in the midst of Shoah; why do we like and revere artworks that depress us? For many casual cinemagoers or channel surfers, such solemn films are too dour. Not worth contemplating. So what compels a subset of us to enter these voids? I can’t speak for all, nor dare I. But, for me, there’s a solace in knowing that feelings like despair and sadness are understood by others. Their communication evidences their universality. Through sad films I gain a comfort that I’m not alone in the dark. Others touch those places, too. And, like horror films, they act as a brief guide to the places we ought not dwell. They’re lanterns.
In the case of Au hasard Balthazar another more devastating question is posed; why be good? Balthazar is presented nobly; a stoic beast who achieves an air of sainthood through submitting to the harsh world of men. Marie, as intimated, follows him through the narrative in a similar fashion. They are too pure for Bresson’s damning portrait of rural France, and so both suffer the martyr’s fate. If capitulating til death is the only path for either of these souls, what is the benefit of capitulation? Why behave better than those who seek to bring them down through corruption and mistreatment?
The question is confronted within the film, when Marie shelters at the miller’s (Pierre Klossowski). The miller – now owner of Balthazar – states “I’m free, obliged only to do what serves my interests”, articulating the benefits of a selfish nature. Again it is inferred heavily that he then takes advantage of Marie; she is exploited just as Balthazar is exploited. Why be better, then, if conscience is controllable? If we can decide to blot out those better angels?
There are a wealth of questions that arise further about just how much one ought to capitulate. These feel pertinent now as the evils of the world coalesce and the need to stand against them grows fiercer by the day. Marie and Balthazar’s submission isn’t a defacto stance to battle evil for, as shown, evil will simply mow the meek down.
But the purity of their idealism gives heart and hope. Perhaps the answer is only in the state of grace placed upon these dual figures, girl and beast. That they have, through enduring a world made imperfect by man, acquired for themselves some status. Become lanterns themselves.
A couple of years ago Jerzy Skolimowski garnered late-career praise for EO, an effort blatantly in homage to Au hasard Balthazar that similarly charted the voiceless exploits of a donkey as it criss-crossed central Europe. I couldn’t quite muster the same enthusiasm as some critics for this work in large part thanks to the significant place that Bresson’s film holds in my heart. If being a cineaste means a devotion to an artform that so beguiles us, Au hasard Balthazar is one of that form’s true religious experiences, casually devastating as it is.
The Lost Highway Hotel 