Au Hazard Balthazar

Robert Bresson, 1966


In style, tone, and technique, Au Hasard Balthazar is very similar to Pickpocket, a film Bresson completed seven years earlier. Yet there is a depth and reach in the later film that vastly outstrip those of its predecessor. If we insist on identifying Bresson as a Catholic director and link his Pickpocket to Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, it will be difficult to resist the temptation to call Balthazar his Brothers Karamazov. This linkage would be a mistake.

As an artist Bresson is many things: acute, engaged, profoundly human, deeply concerned with the darker side of the psyche. To focus on the formal, ethical aspects of his oeuvre, however, is to miss an essential dimension of his work: the dimension of detachment. Though his principle concern may indeed center on morality and his object may be transcendence, he proceeds with such meticulous remove that, if we insist on giving him a label, it should be Buddhist, not Catholic.


As in Pickpocket, the notions of redemption and perdition are inextricably intertwined in this film. Each character loses himself, to pride, to drink, to cruelty, or to avarice, the roads to perdition are as various as the vices of man. Yet in the process of getting lost, each character evinces something beautiful, some redemption dimension to their spirit, be it Maria's revelatory refusal to take the rich man's money or the Albert's transcendent gaze as he journeys through drink to death. Even the long suffering Balthazar, whom we would like to identify with Christ or perhaps some saint, defies taxonomy: we do not know if he is stupid or intelligent, good or bad, he is and remains merely a donkey, one who intermittently suffers and luxuriates at the hands of fate and ultimately dies from a bullet wound, surrounded by sheep in a mountain pasture.


In weaving the human and animal worlds into a common narrative, Bresson definitively abandons any claims to a Catholic aesthetic and replaces it with one that is at once engaged, perceptive, and totally removed. It is as if his gaze, already detached, had moved back still further, had fixed on a vision not so much of man but of life, of currents, tendencies, generalities. The achievement of this film is that he makes this move without ever letting his characters slide into the amorphous and lifeless realm of the abstract. While no character is exactly lifelike, each is profoundly true. The light that sparkles in the eyes of each dumb, flawed beast seems to be all the redemption we are offered.

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