Ghislain Cloquet
Jean Wiener
France
Robert Bresson
95 min
A donkey passes through the hands of every kind of human cruelty and tenderness, and Bresson makes you understand that the donkey is all of us.
Au Hasard Balthazar
Opening Shot
Children baptize a donkey. They pour water on its head and give it a name: Balthazar. The gesture is tender and absurd and serious in the way that only children's rituals are. Ghislain Cloquet's camera watches from a distance that Bresson will maintain for the entire film: close enough to see, far enough to withhold judgment. The donkey accepts the water. It will accept everything.
What It Does
Cloquet's photography is austere to the point of asceticism. Natural light. No dramatic compositions. The camera sits at donkey height when following Balthazar and at human height when following the humans, and Bresson cuts between the two perspectives with an equality that is the film's most radical choice. The donkey's experience and the human's experience are given identical visual weight. This sounds like a technique. It's actually a theology.
Jean Wiener's score is minimal: a piano sonata fragment that recurs in variations. Bresson uses music the way he uses everything, with austerity. The scarcity makes each musical appearance an event. The Schubert piano sonata that accompanies Balthazar's final scene is the most emotionally concentrated use of music in Bresson's filmography.
Bresson's actors (he called them "models") deliver lines without inflection, which is his signature technique. The flatness removes performance and leaves behavior. Anne Wiazemsky as Marie, Balthazar's first owner, plays her descent (from innocence through exploitation to despair) without a single dramatic gesture. Her face doesn't tell you what she feels. Her actions do. Bresson doesn't want you to empathize with characters. He wants you to witness them.
Why It's on the List
Bresson made a film about the totality of human experience, told through a donkey. Balthazar passes from owner to owner, each representing a different form of human failing (vanity, greed, cruelty, indifference), and the donkey's mute acceptance becomes a mirror that reflects every handler's character. Jean-Luc Godard said the film contained "the world in an hour and a half." He wasn't exaggerating. Bresson proved that the most universal story could be told through the most specific vessel, and that stripping away every conventional dramatic tool (emotive acting, dramatic scoring, narrative suspense) could produce the most emotionally overwhelming result.
The Argument Against
Bresson's austerity is his greatest strength and his highest barrier. The flat performances, minimal scoring, and refusal to provide emotional handholds mean that some viewers never connect with the film at all. The religious framework (Balthazar as Christ figure, the seven deadly sins structure) can feel schematic when decoded. And the treatment of the donkey during production, while typical for the era, is uncomfortable for modern audiences who may find the line between depicting animal suffering and causing it uncomfortably thin.
Closing Image
Balthazar lies down among sheep on a hillside. He's been shot by a smuggler's stray bullet. The sheep move around him. The bells on their necks ring. The Schubert plays. He dies among animals who don't register his dying, which is either the most desolate or the most peaceful ending in cinema. Bresson's camera watches without moving. The sheep graze. The bell rings. The donkey is still.