Critics reviews

Bresson withholds traditional emotional crescendos, strengthening audiences' connection to Balthazar, who perhaps look to him as a barometer for what they should be feeling. Such desire for orientation is human nature, which is what Bresson deconstructs.

Bresson never falls into melodrama, even at times when the tension is heightened: like when Gerard chases Marie out of a car as he tries to sexually advance on her. It's a quiet scene—only Jean Wiener's gentle piano score fills the ears. Bresson is brilliant in finding poetry rather than dismay in such moments and as in all of his films, one must look past the austerity to find the beauty.

What Balthazar experiences of human nature is both pure and limited: the embrace of a lonely young woman, the unprovoked attack of an angry young man, and the work of the farms whose owners worry over money. He is only a donkey, and therefore something much more.

What often comes across in reviews as stiff, boring art movies are exactly the opposite: not empty but teeming, not cold but visceral, not dry but saturated. To turn oneself on to Bresson is to ruin oneself for most other movies, as you begin to wonder why so few of them are like Au Hasard Balthazar or Pickpocket really present, breathing, thinking. I'd call that a bargain.

The sheer discomfort of this visual and aural construction is at the heart of Bresson's craft. Filled with hidden meanings and the awful insinuations about the human mind, his work has a magical reverence for martyrdom and suffering. Bresson asks through his puzzling and dense formalism weighted moral questions that seemed seem to doubt fundamentally the innate goodness of man.

It is now, for better or for worse, solely a masterpiece for secular melancholic cineastes and an exercise in futility for the pious Netflix user. Even the Schubert Sonata in A Major, bringing tears to single men at Facets, can be played by a child. That said, what a masterpiece! Cinema's most thorough estrangement of humanity, at the hand of our most enigmatic auteur: from Bresson's editing room, total war on the filmic conventions of emotional identification.

Arguably Bresson's most tragic work (though neck-and-neck for that title with almost every film that followed), Au hasard Balthazar came at the exact midpoint of his feature filmmaking career. With the cool abstraction of The Trial of Joan of Arc behind him, Bresson revealed in Balthazar a more fluid yet wildly elliptical filmmaking style that would blossom throughout the rest of Bresson's career.

One of the most stunning scenes [...is when] the runaway Balthazar is brought into a circus and introduced to the other animals in a sequence of cross-cuts that go back and forth between his gazing eyes and those of the other former denizens of the wilds. The scene condenses much of the complexity of interpretation in the film overall: we can, if we wish, read emotions, meanings, and even acts of empathy and communication in this ping-pong of looks from one animal to another.

All of the ebullient praise always seems to butt up against the sheer and stubborn surface of the film itself. Balthazar is such a concise and economical film that such ovations seem to be answered – like the majestic crescendo of the Schubert piano sonata that accompanies the opening credits – with the braying of an ass. Balthazar is a deft, impassioned, and wrenching film, but it is also — emphatically, absurdly — a film about a donkey. Indeed, it hardly pretends to be much more.

Bresson's 1966 masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar is a film about a donkey who embodies the essence of Marker's "partition." And like Marker's sanctified chatter, Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane. Separating those elements, Bresson seems to demonstrate, only robs each element of its consequence and mystery.

It's the crowning achievement of Bresson's career, and, frankly, it might just be the greatest film ever made... Bresson's films are sacred artifacts that seem almost to exist outside the usual limitations of time and space. Au hasard Balthazar is cinema's holy grail.

Godard's famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is "the world in an hour and a half" suggests how dense, how immense Bresson's brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film's steady accumulation of incident, characters, mystery, and social detail, its implicative use of sound, offscreen space, and editing, have the miraculous effect of turning the director's vaunted austerity into endless plenitude, which is perhaps the central paradox of Bresson's cinema.