A movie about a donkey?
Jan 05 '03
The Bottom Line Robert Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHASAR: The Death of Symbols. (For IngysDayOff's Foreign Film W/O)
In the back of my mind, I was ready to hate Robert Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHASAR. Here was a movie about the life of a donkey, and the different people he encounters during his life. Surely that couldn’t be all there was to it, right? I knew deep down that the film had to be positing the donkey as some kind of deeper symbol, a kind of Forrest Gumpian beast of burden, and I hate movies about symbols. But then I actually watched it and was surprised to discover that, hey, this might just be a movie about a donkey.
Having seen some of Bresson’s films before, however, I knew that one was required to do some heavy lifting to get to the bottom of what he had to say, so I couldn’t just leave it at the “movie about a donkey” theory. So I began to look at the people who surrounded the donkey, and once again Bresson surprised me, seemingly anticipating my need to find a meaning. Looking back on the film, it becomes clear that the donkey is intended to be a symbol all right- not to the audience, but rather the others in the film. To each person whose life the donkey touches, he means something different.
The film begins with children playing with the young donkey on a farm. They run around with him, and sneak into the barn to baptize him “Balthasar.” It becomes clear that the girl, whose family lives on the farm, and the boy, from the city, have a sweet little crush on each other, and are broken up when his family has to return home. Years pass, and Balthasar has grown up, working on the farm, which the farmer insists will be run using traditional methods. The girl has grown up as well, and is now the town tramp. The boy sometimes visits, and they continue to profess their love for each other, but he never stays long. There is also another boy in town, a mischief-maker, who tortures Balthasar and uses him for his own ends, and he has a relationship with the girl as well.
Balthasar means something different to each of the people he encounters. To the girl, he symbolizes the innocence she has lost since her childhood. To her father the farmer, he is a beast of burden, but as the hard work on his farm wears on him, he also symbolizes the stubborn adherence to old ways. To the boy, he is simply a tool to aid him in his hell-raising, treated poorly (as when he ties a firecracker to Balthasar’s tail). And after the farmer dies, the farmer’s wife treats the donkey like a saint, in memory of her departed husband.
The other great film this calls to mind is Hal Ashby’s BEING THERE (which is otherwise very different from Bresson). In that film, Peter Sellers played Chance, a man of limited intelligence who happened into the company of a dying billionaire, a close friend of the President of the U.S. Chance would smile and utter simple phrases, mostly about gardening, and yet the sophisticated men found themselves taken aback by his wisdom. What he said made sense to them, it had a great deal of significant meaning, but Chance meant nothing at all by them. He was just talking about the only subject he knew. What was significant to the characters in the movie wasn’t what he was saying as much as the meaning they took from it. They projected their agendas onto Chance’s words.
Robert Bresson, one of the most rigorous of master filmmakers, famously treated his actors less like performers than mannequins. He made his cast (“models”, he called them) strip all spontaneous emotion from their performances, until they simply spoke the lines given them and moved as they were directed to. His goal was to invite the audience to project their emotions upon the people onscreen, and with AU HASARD BALTHASAR he found perhaps his ultimate performer- the donkey himself. The donkey doesn’t know how to be false, but rather simply exists onscreen, and everyone else in the film projects onto him. Was Bresson using Balthasar to comment on his own style of filmmaking?
What Bresson has done with AU HASARD BALTHASAR, in my opinion, is to shed light not only on the way serious filmgoers (and some not-so-serious ones) seek to find symbolic meaning in films, but also how we all attach meaning to the significant things in our lives. Think not only of pets you’ve owned, but also inanimate objects that feel nothing and don’t respond to your touch but nonetheless mean something. They all have stories. The BELLE DE JOUR poster which hangs over my bed might just be a poster from a great movie to some, but to me it’s the poster I bought for fifty cents from the video store I worked at one summer just before they closed. I bought my television after my previous one fell headfirst onto the concrete floor. My stereo was a Christmas gift. And so on.
The stories might give these items more meaning to me than they might have had otherwise, but they’re still just what they are. At the end of AU HASARD BALTHASAR, the donkey wanders into a herd of sheep, falls to the ground, and dies as the sheep pass by. In spite of what he meant to the girl, the farmer, his wife, and the boy, he’s still just a donkey. The girl will still remember her distant love with a sigh, the farmer is still dead, the wife will mourn him, and the boy will make trouble in some other manner. Life goes on, with or without symbols.
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hkoreeda
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Member: Paul Clark
Location: Ohio
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About Me:
What's the polite term for "unemployed wannabe critic"?
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