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0 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 I think I understand the Germans a little better now ..... Aug 30, 2009
"... flawed characters....", "noble suffering...", Christ metaphors, critiques on capitalism and religious faith pahhhh. If these were your neighbors you would think they needed a good conquering also. Sometimes pain can be cathartic. This movie is just painful. Some movies have multiple layers or levels of meaning. You can read most anything you are inclined into this movie (parallels to modern day politics!), just don't expect anything consistent or cohesive (see earlier) other than those absurd French folk. This movie gets closest to its own truth when shoveling out the stables ( wow, that clinches it, Bresson/Nostradamus predictive metaphors of 21st century American politics!!). Bresson should have been English, then maybe the French would have known how to react to this film. Technical quality is very good.
P.S. If you think I am insulting France in general rather than its depiction in this film, you are missing the point.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 The Human Condition Through The Eyes of a Donkey Jun 17, 2009
So here's possibly my favorite movie ever: "Au Hazard, Balthazar" is a rare example of how cinema can rise to the profundity and formal complexity of a Beethoven string quartet. It also brought me as close to a religious experience as I have ever experienced in a dark theater. Finally, it is surely the finest movie about a donkey ever made.
Made in France in1966 by visionary director Robert Bresson, the protagonist is Balthazar, a donkey who is born, lives, suffers and dies in a mean little rural village. He is passed from owner to owner: a loving family bound for dissolution and bankruptcy; a drunken tramp who beats him; a circus where he performs tricks; a lecherous mill owner who uses him as a beast of burden; a gang of delinquents who use him for smuggling contraband. Whether ill-treated or well-treated, Balthazar mutely submits uncomplaining (except for the occasional emission of a magnificent bray). For that is all an animal can do.
Balthazar's life parallels that of the daughter of his first owner, Marie, who garlands him with flowers and baptizes him when she is a little girl, but grows into adolescence making every wrong choice imaginable. She spurns her childhood sweetheart, whose wealth could save her father's failing farm. Instead she falls in love with the vicious local hoodlum, with horrendous consequences. For unlike donkeys, humans exercise free will, but in Marie's case, this leads to degradation and despair.
"Balthazar" is not really a movie about a donkey; it is about the people in whose midst he lives and dies, and the seven deadly sins that he will never taste. Director Bresson suppresses surface emotion by eliciting expressionless performances from his non-professional cast; he employs no soundtrack music except for an occasional snatch of a Schubert pinao sonata; he likes to shoot people at waist level passing in and out of doorways a whole lot, rather than letting them emote; he omits the dramatic moments that would be central to a normal movie. Bresson's austere style allows the viewer to supply the missing emotion. This witholding of conventional drama magically makes small moments pack the wallop of an explosion.
French director Jean-Luc Godard called "Balthazar" "the whole world in ninety minutes." Through the mute eyes of a donkey, the human condition is revealed. And to paraphrase another critic, Donald Richie, when you watch the final scene of this film, I defy you not to weep. And you won't be crying for Balthazar. You will be crying for us.
1 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 Quelle Damage Jun 12, 2009
This "movie" has all the emotional maturity of a goth kid imagining his sad end while staring out the window on a rainy day and listening to the Cure.
Nobody smiles.
Nobody laughs.
Nobody is nice.
Nobody is redeemable.
Nothing good happens.
Everything tritely bad that can happen, happens.
Oh and there's a donkey too.
And nobody acts...except the donkey.
So critics who want to say "this is life" must be having a particularly grim life. Or more likely enjoy thinking they do.
But on top of all that, Bresson has all the ham-handed skills and technique of a first year film student. "I need to convey an idea. I will show that idea - have it remain static in the frame for an uncomfortable amount of time so that the very slow (donkeys?) can absorb it, then move on to my next plodding idea." It's hard to describe, and perhaps you would have had to have seen a large number of bad student projects to recognize the technique. But about an hour into the movie you are hoping that somebody involved can get out and give it a push - preferably down a very steep hill into a donkey-filled crevasse where sheep will devour it.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Magnificent Oct 18, 2008
The greatness of Robert Bresson's 1966 black and white film, Au Hasard Balthazar (which, translated, means something like Randomly Balthazar or By Chance Balthazar), comes not from only one aspect of it, nor even just a few. Virtually every aspect of the film reeks and resonates greatness, although, despite this being the near full consensus opinion of film lovers and critics alike, it is one of the most poorly understood films I've ever read the criticism of. This is because so many aspects of the film are based upon its most superficial qualities, rather than those deeper and more essential, even as the film achieves this depth in only 95 minutes. This economy occurs because the film focuses not on the superfluities of living, but only those things with resonance and meaning, the important and poetic moments that distill all else. And, oftentimes, those things with meaning are not the expected architectures of the human face, but those of other parts of the human body, like hands, backs, and human postures; all of which evoke connections and depths that would likely be unthinkable to cogitate on in films by other directors.
But before I get into this film's essence, let me synopsize the narrative. The film is a picaresque `animal film,' and I am an animal lover, so I am emotionally inclined to be favorable to any such film. Yet, when I write this fact of the film's nature, I do not mean it in the way a film like My Dog Skip (a great `animal' film aimed at children) is an `animal film.' Au Hasard Balthazar goes above and beyond even that high level of art, for many reasons; yet one of the most manifest is that it is shorn of all sentimentalism, even that sort which is meant in a positive sense. The film follows the life and death of a male donkey in the French countryside. Named and christened Balthazar by his first owner- a young girl named Marie, the donkey grows up, changes owners several times, and eventually ages, and bleeds nearly to death, seemingly dying on a hilltop, surrounded by a flock of sheep, after being accidentally shot at night, when he is stolen by the film's villain, to transport illegal good across the French border. But, before that denouement, we get to see many slices of life: that of the donkey, its owners, and the people that are around it in the small village; even those things that are beyond the purview of the beast's impassive eye....Au Hasard Balthazar is nothing short of a masterpiece; a work of art of the highest order; amongst the greatest dozen or two films ever made, and on par with the same highly ranked works of art by the greatest writers, poets, playwrights, musicians, and painters. It also points out convincingly why art is better than religion or philosophy in dealing with the `big questions' in life, for art has an economy neither of the other two pursuits possess- witness Balthazar's death. How many words would be spilt in a religious text or philosophic tract to distill what the mere sight of a dying donkey amidst sheep does? Art is models of the real that encode and decode the real while elevating the very process of that encoding and decoding. Art (and especially film and its even more abstract cousin, poetry) can penetrate far more deeply, and with far less distraction than any other human media, into the essentials of existence. Art can elucidate these matters with eloquence and profundity; and art, and only art, can do so in the hands of a great artist.
I give you Robert Bresson.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Simple and tragic--one of the best Aug 26, 2008
"Au Hasard Balthazar" is a heartbreaking masterpiece by Robert Bresson. The simplicity of his storytelling is deceptive; he can sum up the tragedy of the human condition so brilliantly through the story of a donkey and the people who surround it. The ending is tragic, yet beautiful and redemptive. I first saw this one cold winter's day as a university student in Boston, and I still haven't forgotten about how I felt after first watching it.
Vicente Salazar
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