Title: Au Hasard Balthazar
Director: Robert Bresson
Country of Origin: France
Year: 1966
Screening format: Blu-ray
Setting: Home
First viewing? Yes
Another Bresson. A lot to unpack here. It’s tempting to look for a one-to-one correlation (“[Christ] made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant” – and who embodies the very nature of a servant better than Balthazar, a donkey battered, beaten, and dragged around with no will of his own). But watching Au Hasard Balthazar, my thoughts continue to fall on Old Testament figures, namely Job and Hosea. After all, not all Biblical symbolism is Christological. And Balthazar is far from the only such figure. Gérard, perhaps a bit of Beelzebub in him, though I tend to look at him as Vice or Sin in general who has the run of the town and to whom the Prodigal Marie always comes when called, even if she puts up a brief, feeble fight at first. Marie, all of mankind, in possession of her own free will who twice rejects an offer of marriage from the only real Christ figure I see in Balthazar (the landowner’s son, Jacques—the landowner is God, by the way), first citing her inability to truly love him then her own checkered past as reasons not to choose him. Au Hasard Balthazar is not so much allegory, perhaps, as it is parable. But it is all masterpiece. And who (but perhaps Bresson) knew a donkey’s face could be so beautiful?
The Church at Miller, Glenn 