“Au hasard” brings to mind gambling and perhaps in turn the Roman soldiers casting lots for Christ’s clothes at the foot of the cross, if that’s not too much of a stretch.
I don’t think that’s a stretch at all. It ties in nicely with Gerard and his gang of fellow delinquents. Thanks for pointing that out.
Thanks Gringo.
I’ve been noodling around some more and found a couple interesting tidbits:
Balthazar, Bresson once explained, was inspired by a passage in The Idiot where Prince Myshkin tells three giggling girls of the happiness he experienced upon hearing the sound of a donkey’s bray in a foreign marketplace, and the movie’s premise is suitably “idiotic.”
— from a review by Village Voice critic J. Hoberman
The donkey, Bresson said, “has in his life the same stages as does a man, that is to say, childhood, caresses; maturity, work; talent, genius in the middle of life; and the analytical period that precedes death.”
— from a review by Los Angeles Times critic Manohla Dargis
(Neither cited their primary sources).
Well, the title comes from one of the three kings Bresson liked before he made this film. Bresson is Calthic, you know.
How do you keep finding all these old threads to bump, Christopher? Do you just hang out on the 400th page of the forum all the time?
it’s a good challenge though, find a conversation where all the participants are dead….there must be one longer than three posts….in a hall of mubi ghosts…..(where most of them aren’t previous incarnations of wu yong or bob…and i have my suspicions about gringo tex….)
I agree, Twodead: I have it on good authority he was neither a Gringo nor a Texan. In fact, he was a she, a Franco-Canadian named Jules Pomerantz-Guillaume.
Do you just hang out on the 400th page of the forum all the time?
I was planning on doing that myself.
Singing Mason
Balthazar was one of the three magi, and, as James Quandt explains in his Criterion essay, a frequent figure in religious paintings. Bresson explains (if I’ve got it right) that au hasard is a family motto of one of the French nobility. Is it a shortened form of a motto then, like honi soit for honi soit qui mal y pense, or semper fi for semper fidelis?
Balthazar, I suppose, is a plausible name for a pet donkey, being slightly cute and not in common use as a boy’s name. The name may further serve to preclude too literal an identification of the donkey with Christ. (I don’t think the film is directly allegorical). “Au hasard” brings to mind gambling and perhaps in turn the Roman soldiers casting lots for Christ’s clothes at the foot of the cross, if that’s not too much of a stretch.
What does the title convey to francophones?