Review of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) by Lester Y — 18 Mar 2010

Paraphrasing something Godard once said, Au Hasard Balthazar is your life in 95 minutes. The carefree days of youth, the loss of innocence, heartbreak and triumph, and everything in between, all beautifully told in such a sharply devastating way, but also with a level of unparalleled tenderness and honesty that makes every step of the journey as inevitable as death itself.

Slow and abstract, it's very minimalist and calculated in its approach. Most of the time it forces the viewer to fill in the missing details and leaves a lot of things up to the viewer's interpretation. Perhaps you might have to tune right into Bresson's frequency to even enjoy this film, and some might call it an impenetrable religious allegory. But I still think there's a certain universality to it, something within the fable that everyone could relate to. Well worth watching.