Of all of French auteur Robert Bresson's films, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) may be his most beloved and yet rarely screened film. Ranked in the top twenty all-time great works of the cinema in Sight & Sound's recent polling of over 200 international critics, Bresson's masterpiece is a stunning parable framed through the stages of a donkey's birth, life, and death as it shoulders the pain of the world. Unlike most movies with animal characters, however, the donkey Balthazar remains completely non-anthropomorphic, mysterious and inscrutable, appearing only sporadically in the film's elliptical narrative.
Bresson, ever the chronicler of inner states, focuses more on the human characters in his story (one of his few non-literary adaptations) and draws from a cast of non-professional actors (or "models") who embody characters in rural France: the teenaged Marie (Anne Wiazemsky, future wife of Jean-Luc Godard) finds herself emotionally drawn to an amoral hoodlum, Gerard, and spurns her more conventional lover, Jacques; Marie's father inherits a farm property
and prides himself on its upkeep to a degree that scandalizes the local community; Arnold, a town drunkard, wanders around until he finds himself embroiled in a murder case.
The film is famous for its inimitable Bressonian touches: the beautiful faces of his models with downcast eyes and hidden souls, their physical actions emphasizing their hands; the vivid soundtrack assembled in careful tandem with every frame of the film-from layered rural sounds to material textures to Balthazar's heartbreaking braying; the precise use of Schubert's meditative sonata; the
cumulative power of the film's paradoxical treatment of behaviors and desires that reveal a portrait of the human condition; the philosophical tensions of free will and fate, suffering and redemption. It's a teasing, haunting, and deeply affecting achievement that could quite possibly alter the way you watch movies forever.
Unadorned, unassuming, unsentimental, Bresson's masterpiece puts a donkey centre stage and through him we see all humanity. Never was an animal treated with such respect by a filmmaker; never were we viewed, in all our stupidity and transcendence, with such unrelenting compassion. 'Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished, because this film is really the world in an hour and a half' - Jean-Luc Godard.
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Au Hasard Balthazar 
