Day 2: "Au Hasard Balthazar"

Jean Luc Godard famously remarked of "Balthazar" that it was "basically the world in an hour and a half". While I certainly wouldn't go that far, Robert Bressons Au Hasard Balthazar has remained one of the most acute meditations on the human condition ever seen in film.

The plotline is rather simple: The main protagonist is a donkey(named Balthazar) who is passed from owner to owner, with varying degrees of kindness and cruelty. Each owner the donkey encounters has underlying motivations he cannot begin to understand. Balthazars first owner, a sweet young girl named Marie, passess from master to master as well, and it is extremely affecting to see their stories run parallel.

I'll be honest, I don't know how many people will Netflix a minimalist 1966 foreign film about a donkey. I can safely say that this film is not for everyone, but for those who give it a chance, I believe you will be rewarded. In Balthazar, we are never given a classic "reaction" shot from the donkey, nor are we given any on cue brays to react to a specific event. Balthazar keeps moving along, seemingly unswayed by any immediate event, and we must create out own empathy, outrage, etc etc. In addition, you won't find any Oscar winning actors in this film. Bresson was known to shoot a scene upwards of 50 times, until the actors were simply automatons reciting words and performing gestures. On the surface, this may seem like a cold approach, however I believe it is an altogether inviting challenge to our own emotional intelligence. The characters portray lives without telling us how to feel about them. This requires a concentrated effort to develop our own myriad emotions about the film,and it is worth the effort.

Given this philosophy, it is easy to see why the donkey is a great choice as the main character. He can only communicate in physical terms: When it's tail is burned, it brays violently. When it has been working in the circus all day as a "donkey with the powers of mulitplication", it is tired.

Bresson seems to suggest that the life of Balthazar is perhaps closer to our own lives than we would like to admit. Marie,and the rest of us, are magnificently complex, brilliant beings with endless reasoning and thinking skills. However, in the end, the world does what it wishes with us. The saddest thing about Maries' parallel story with Balthazar is one assumes her intellect gives her the power to transcend or escape her suffering. What it really does though, is give her the ability to comprehend her trials, not have control over them( to borrow from a recent book I read, "Almost nothing important to you ever happens because you engineer it. Destiny seems to lean trench coated in a dark alley whispering psssst, while we are busy racing to engineer something".)Maries fate is not as fatal as Balthazars in the end, although I certain part of me wondered if that really was the case.

So, this film kind of seems like a total downer, huh? Bresson does seem to offer, in the films conclusion, a silver lining:empathy. Balthazar seems to achieve this in the end;an empathy less dominated by the endless analyzing characteristic of human beings, and more by the simple awareness, the awareness of what it is hidden in plain sight, coming from a dumb beast. The film may not be "the world in an hour and a half", but if you look closer, perhaps it could be yours, if only for a little while.