Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Brian Berta I've seen a lot of films about animals getting abused from that animals perspective. Some films that share this plot line can easily feel cookie-cutter after you've been exposed to it several times. I had a few concerns about that when I was about to go into this movie. Fortunately, however, "Au Hasard Balthazar" was not one of those examples. It turned out to be an exception. It was able to stand out amongst the rest of them. I don't think that it's flawless, but it's still a great movie.This film chronicles the life of an abused donkey named Balthazar as it passes from cruel owner to cruel owner. Meanwhile, the life of a young girl who originally owned it named Marie is chronicled as she gets badly treated by her abusive boyfriend. Both of their lives seem parallel to each other.On my re-watches, I noticed how the movie has a lot of religious symbolism. For instance, the fact that Balthazar goes through seven different owners could mean numerous things. It could represent the seven deadly sins or the seven sacraments. Also, Marie's name sounds similar to "Mary", the mother of Jesus. That's another example of symbolism. There's also the donkey's baptism that the kids try to do. It makes Balthazar seem divine. Also, the wreath of flowers put on Balthazar's head reminded me slightly of the Christ's crown of thorns. Also, the wine that Arnold drinks, and the bread that Gerard delivers could represent transubstantiation. There might be a few more examples from the movie that I missed. Some of the symbolism is a bit obvious, but I didn't mind that too much. I have a few explanations which explain Bresson's purpose for including them. The first one is that he could be trying to juxtapose religion with sin or simply good with evil. My second interpretation is that he might also be trying to establish Balthazar as a divine figure. My last interpretation is that he might be trying to inform the viewers that there is a special heaven for animals, as well as people.One of the things which set this film apart from many other films with similar plots is that it chronicles the hardships of Marie as well as Balthazar. When Balthazar was young, Marie was one of his original owners. Both of these characters lived relatively parallel lives. Balthazar got abused by each of his cruel owners, and Marie gets abused by her boyfriend Jacques who tried to force himself onto her in numerous scenes. However, the difference between the two of them is that Marie could defend herself to an extent, unlike Balthazar. Marie sometimes tried to avoid being around Jacques. Balthazar, on the other hand, was powerless, and he had very minimal reactions. Balthazar simply walked and waited for someone to give him order. The reason why he behaved this way was likely that he knew that his life consisted of him either feeling or not feeling pain. The most he did in the film was bray every now and then. It was almost like he couldn't do anything else to defend himself as he was powerless to his owners.The fate of Marie was not stated at the end of the film. After she gets stripped and beaten, we don't see her again. It's likely that she's going into a life of servitude. However, we do find out Balthazar's fate by the ending. After he's accidentally shot while Jacques uses him to steal certain items, he walks up to a sheep herd and spends his last minutes with them before he dies. There are a few interpretations I have for what Bresson intended by this scene. It could mean that Balthazar is trying to die in peace away from the abusive owners he encountered in his life. It could also mean that Balthazar is thinking of the life he could've had if he had kinder owners. Regardless of what Bresson intended by this scene, I still found it to be memorable. I enjoy movies with tragic endings, because they often linger with me long after viewing them (sometimes, I even like them more than happy endings). I appreciate directors who aren't afraid to step out of the comfort zones of audience members.The only major issue I had with this film was with the character of Jacques. I found him to be very oversimplified. In the first scene, he seemed like a nice kid. In the next scene when he's all grown up, however, he turns violent as he abuses Balthazar and forces himself on Marie. The movie doesn't explain how he became that way. It just skips his character arc and tells us "Jacques is a bad character, so you should dislike him", thus oversimplifying him. Also, most of the owners of Balthazar were either very underutilized or unmemorable. The only one who I found to be memorable was Arnold, but that was only because he was in the movie more.In conclusion, this was a pretty good movie. Robert Bresson did a great job with this film as he turned a tired plot into a memorable film that does a lot differently than other films. It could have been better, but it was still pretty good. This is the 2nd Bresson film I've watched (the first one being "A Man Escaped" which I enjoyed a bit more). I'm going to probably keep watching his films since he's proved himself to be a talented filmmaker.

chaos-rampant To read through most reviews of Balthazar feels like having stepped inside a church with people sighing about god and transcendence, which is a testament to Bresson's power here in his most spiritual work so far. But let me step outside in clear air for a moment.It was an ongoing project for him, striving for an ascetic eye that purifies. He had began (essentially) with Diary of a Priest, ambitious work about a spiritual journey. But I believe he was troubled by a few things in it, if his next films offer any clue.He spent the next couple of films completely muting the emotional turmoil evident in Diary, taking all the romanticism out, making them purely about the desire to break free from a prison-world. Pickpocket and Jeanne D'Arc were sketches in that austere direction. But this was setting him down a disastrous path where the only thing purer was was just more and more bare. When does fasting become starving and why is a stone floor purer than a furnished house? How about we say that his desire to evoke the abstract was laudable, but his dogmatic way of doing it absolutely killed the world in which it lives and hides? His camera murders it. It only managed to take the pure out of life and make a liturgy around its dead body. It was destroying the possibility for cinematic space to support metaphor, inner life, poetry, and to simply be anything other than dead nature. The process of facts alone won't do, they can never convey life, much less pure life. So I had my sights set on Balthazar as his most pure, most lauded, and expected perhaps to mount a critique of a spirituality that is only its own funeral. But I believe he beat me to the punch. I believe he began to see that he was starving himself, at least so far as the film is different from before.This is his most lush, his most ambitious since Diary (none of the interim were), his most accomplished and with the most life. His camera doesn't just stare, it moves again and searches. He doesn't just create ellipsis within a scene, he makes it move across the narrative. A household collapses, but we move to see this in the girl's disastrous relationship with a despicable bully, and we experience the loss of innocence, the fouling of kindness in her world, in Balthazar's treatment at the hands of several callous owners.At the center Bresson has the most placid, most unassuming actor, a selfless being. It's by reading what we do in Balthazar's eyes that we color the whole and it ripples through and becomes ours. We have the reactions he doesn't and thus humanize ourselves. It's marvelous and it plumbs into something fundamental about how the world is put together that makes it worthy beyond technique.See, life will break down, sometimes for no other reason than someone changed his mind about a deal and pride. It will break and scatter in pieces, go through the cycle of suffering. The film ends with everything broken, nothing put back together, the girl having left off for a next life somewhere.What it plumbs is that what we see into these makes a difference. There's abandonment at the end, heartbreak, anonymous loss of a soul that we knew as dear. But I would rather see courage myself. Instead of projecting our human terror into him, take from his capacity to endure. If suffering isn't pain, it's not being able to abide pain; how about there is nothing lost, nothing broken, there is only a time for things to come together and a time to disperse again? Balthazar isn't lost, he has returned, or so it goes maybe.

Robin Kluger Vigfusson Aside from the actors being forced by Bresson to give self-consciously impassive performances, the whole premise of the picture is false and tortured. Bresson makes a donkey a metaphor for saintly Christian behavior and by imposing his religion on nature, Bresson, himself, is contemptible and grandiose. Animals are pure beings for the very fact that they are outside of man made dogma. They are creatures of intuition and emotion who often seem far more moral than human beings steeped in the kind of theology Bresson wants to extol, here.I know I'm in the minority, but I think, for the very reason Bresson forced his own world view onto innocent Balthazar, the movie is a failure. For me, the only moving scene was the climax where dying Balthazar seeks out a herd of sheep for comfort. These animals are as pure and unassuming as he is for the very reason that they have no religion or agenda, unlike the film's director.

Jackson Booth-Millard When I read about this French/Swedish film, that featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I assumed from the description it would be like a War Horse style movie, only with no war and stuff, but it turned out to be nothing like that, LOL, from director Robert Bresson. Basically this film follows the life of a donkey named Balthazar, as he grows up and passes from owner to owner, all treating them differently, either with kindness or cruelty, and making him go through happiness and sadness. Throughout the film Balthazar is surrounded by loving children, beaten by the lover of his owner, forced into carrying heavy and painful loads, until he finds peace with nice people and dies a natural death. Starring Anne Wiazemsky as Marie, François Lafarge as Gérard, Philippe Asselin as Marie's father, Nathalie Joyaut as Marie's mother, Walter Green as Jacques, Jean-Claude Guilbert as Arnold the tramp, Pierre Klossowski as Merchant, Jean Rémignard as Notary, Jacques Sorbets as Police Officer/Captain, Tord Paag as Louis, François Sullerot as Baker and Marie-Claire Fremont as Baker's wife. The performances of the film are fine, but the obvious creature that steals the show is the cute donkey who lights up the screen in all his scenes, good and bad, I will admit I did not pay the fullest attention to what was going on, but I suppose it is a drama to see. Very good!