Au Hasard Balthazar

The central character is a donkey. Balthazar passes from owner to owner, wearing down a little more in each pair of hands, and the lives of the people around him become visible through him. Bresson gives the animal no human qualities; it does not perform, it simply exists and carries what happens. Jean-Luc Godard said of this film that it contained the world in an hour and a half. As usual, Bresson used no professional actors. The one exception is Anne Wiazemsky, and this was her first film; she was eighteen. She later became Godard's wife and one of his performers. Marie and Balthazar grow up together and are then left to their separate fates: she takes up with a young man who treats her badly, the donkey circulates between beatings, torture and a circus. The film does not connect these; it places them side by side. Who it is for: viewers who treat cinema as a moral question and are ready for performance stripped of expression and a hard simplicity. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot watch animal cruelty. Bresson's method also reads as cold on first contact, and the film never offers relief.