The cryptically self-evident Balthazar, dating fairly precisely back to the middle of the director’s active career, may well be Bresson’s most elusive film, in which he takes ellipticity to the extreme. In the industrial transition marked by the uneasy coexistence of horse-drawn carts and tractors, an innocent creature – a donkey changing hands like Tolstoy’s dirty money – represents the most ancient model of the “working machine”. Balthazar finds a trusted friend in Marie, whose youth is overshadowed by her father’s financial problems and by two rival wooers presented as almost polar opposites: the overly kind Jacques and Gérard, a gang leader oozing almost absolute evil.
This group picture filled with morally ambiguous characters grows into a catalogue of human swinishness, with each of the donkey’s hosts symbolising a cardinal sin. The presence of crime, violence and death is constant, and the sum of intersecting storylines – even of disparate genres – results in the author’s most pessimistic interpretation of the world until then. Religious allegories and the tradition of animal fables meet laconic declarativity and quiet humour skilfully concealed within the structures.
Even in its cruelty, this sensuously bright and uncompromising work of art is full of memories of the director’s childhood – “the countryside, the fields, the trees, the animals” – and Bresson himself acknowledged the personal nature of his creation: “Balthazar seems to me the most liberated film I’ve made, the one into which I’ve put the most of myself.”
Lauri Timonen