Review of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) by Nate A — 22 Feb 2008

This film is hard for me to review. Whilst Bresson's minimalist, elliptical, and subtle films are polarising enough as it is, this film is uber-Bresson. In essence, this is Bresson at his most extreme and his most boring. But profoundly boring. Like Mouchette, we witness the suffering and degradation of an innocent female protagonist. Like L'Argent, criminal youth gangs present a bleak "Clockwork Orange" vision of anomie and societal breakdown. Au Hasard Balthasar encapsulates the major themes addressed throughout Bresson's work.

As well as boredom, you will feel pain at the incessant minor and major cruelties throughout this film. Whether it is the whipping of a donkey, a principled man dying penniless because of another's greed, indecent sexual advances (to say the least), the litany of horror is endless. But as Godard pointed out, this horror is presented with a kind of "Christian mildness." The utterly horrific and despicable humanity that we see in Bresson's work in a way necessitates his elliptical narrative style. Without Bresson's avoidance of the main events of the narrative, the erasure of action, in favour of focusing on minor moments, gestures, people's limbs rather than their faces and so on all we would have is unmitigated cruelty. That he breaks his actors down and leaves them thoroughly stripped down and mechanised does his characters a favour - the attenuation of human agency is the only way that humanity can be seen as redeemable, given the nasty acts they inevitably commit or have to endure. His style is necessitated by the problem at the center of his ouevre - the moral status of modern society and the human being. Whilst I see his answer as Augustinian to say the least, he manages to pick out small moments of transcendence in his film-making. Whatever one might say about the entertainment value of his work, this is no small gift. Thus Duras' comment that his films have a different 'provenance' than other film-makers. His work and his goal is greater than cinema; he is at once over-rated and unratable.

Philistines need not apply.