Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

 Robert Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar"

With his 1966 masterpiece, "Au Hasard Balthazar," Robert Bresson takes his typical cold, inaccessible style of filming actors as 'models' to a whole new level. In this film, the atypical emotional behavior of the characters in the story are that much more unintimate and understandable due to the perspective with which the film is viewed through. The titular 'Balthazar' is a donkey witnessing the senselessness of humanity, thereby making the seemingly cold and alien actions of the human characters around him that much more under a metaphorical microscope.

There is a coherent plot structure happening around the donkey. Namely, it revolves in and around Marie, a young teenage girl living in the French countryside with her father, a farmer. Through the film, Balthazar witnesses Marie's father's legal issues unfold, Marie's tumultuous relationship with a violent young man involved in a criminal gang, and miller exploiting him for his labor. 

Through the unfolding of events, Balthazar remains an observer. Rather than having the animal react in any sort of way to establish a notion of how to feel about these events, Balthazar simply observes. And because Bresson instructs his actors to perform mechanically and expressionless, it is left up to the viewer to interpret the emotional takeaway. 

I am inclined to believe that different people come away with different takeaways. Personally, my takeaway is that human behavior is senseless and without reason or comprehension. The decisions the characters seem to make is untethered to any sort of logical understanding. They are self-destructive, cruel, and hostile to both one another and to Balthazar. 

While I don't fervently adhere to this theory, there are many who speculate that Balthazar is symbolic of Christ - carrying the sins of humanity on his back. He is tortured, beaten, mocked, and belittled. And yet, Balthazar remains good and innocent: a pure specimen untouched by the same afflictions that turn humans into monsters. While I don't completely comply with this interpretation, the closing images of Balthazar dying in the field with the herd of sheep does conjure Christ-like imagery.

Because we're dealing with Bresson, I feel it important to note that this film, along with Bresson's others, adheres to a specific tone. Because of the specificities of Bresson's direction, the tone of his films often comes across and cold and empty. Empty of emotion, pleasure, etc. With "Au Hasard Balthazar," we sympathize/empathize with Balthazar, which allows us to feel the film's tone. We the viewer, like Balthazar, is simply observers to human behavior, unable to affect it or react to it really in any way. We become as trapped by this as our titular donkey, forced to view humanity more as animalistic specimens. The cruelty and violence is forced upon us (the donkey), without any recourse or reaction. Bresson is demonstrating the helplessness with which he views humanity, unable to come to any conclusions or accommodations.

 I feel a certain sense of liberty with "Au Hasard Balthazar." Bresson uses an silent observer as a protagonist and a cast of unemotive, mechanical people to create such a blank slate of meaning, that the viewer can use it as a Rorschach Test to determine their relationship to the piece. Once Bresson has eliminated the human characters' familiarity, the viewer becomes less biased to them - unable to reason away their behavior. Rather, because the way they move and behave is more alien to us, we cannot emotionally engage with them. We are left to emotionally engage with their actions, instead (along with the consequences to their actions). We as viewers must reconcile with our own actions removed from any emotional reasoning to those actions.

There is a profoundness about "Au Hasard Balthazar." I believe that each iteration of watching will yield different emotional reactions from the viewer. Because of this, the film is an eternal wellspring with which to pull from. Its interpretations are simply our own understanding of humanity.