Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.
Au Hasard Balthazar is one of cinema's most singular achievements. Bresson's conceit — mapping the spiritual weight of human suffering onto the life of a donkey — is executed with absolute conviction and originality. The elliptical editing, flat performances deployed as a deliberate spiritual device, and Schubert's haunting interjections make the cinematography and formal construction genuinely exceptional. The ending, Balthazar dying amid a flock of sheep, is among the most transcendent and devastating in film history. Acting is assessed per Bresson's model-not-actor approach, which is intentionally affectless — effective within his system but not conventionally accomplished, hence slightly held back. Plot, though fragmented by design, achieves something no conventional narrative structure could.