Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

chaos-rampant To read through most reviews of Balthazar feels like having stepped inside a church with people sighing about god and transcendence, which is a testament to Bresson's power here in his most spiritual work so far. But let me step outside in clear air for a moment.It was an ongoing project for him, striving for an ascetic eye that purifies. He had began (essentially) with Diary of a Priest, ambitious work about a spiritual journey. But I believe he was troubled by a few things in it, if his next films offer any clue.He spent the next couple of films completely muting the emotional turmoil evident in Diary, taking all the romanticism out, making them purely about the desire to break free from a prison-world. Pickpocket and Jeanne D'Arc were sketches in that austere direction. But this was setting him down a disastrous path where the only thing purer was was just more and more bare. When does fasting become starving and why is a stone floor purer than a furnished house? How about we say that his desire to evoke the abstract was laudable, but his dogmatic way of doing it absolutely killed the world in which it lives and hides? His camera murders it. It only managed to take the pure out of life and make a liturgy around its dead body. It was destroying the possibility for cinematic space to support metaphor, inner life, poetry, and to simply be anything other than dead nature. The process of facts alone won't do, they can never convey life, much less pure life. So I had my sights set on Balthazar as his most pure, most lauded, and expected perhaps to mount a critique of a spirituality that is only its own funeral. But I believe he beat me to the punch. I believe he began to see that he was starving himself, at least so far as the film is different from before.This is his most lush, his most ambitious since Diary (none of the interim were), his most accomplished and with the most life. His camera doesn't just stare, it moves again and searches. He doesn't just create ellipsis within a scene, he makes it move across the narrative. A household collapses, but we move to see this in the girl's disastrous relationship with a despicable bully, and we experience the loss of innocence, the fouling of kindness in her world, in Balthazar's treatment at the hands of several callous owners.At the center Bresson has the most placid, most unassuming actor, a selfless being. It's by reading what we do in Balthazar's eyes that we color the whole and it ripples through and becomes ours. We have the reactions he doesn't and thus humanize ourselves. It's marvelous and it plumbs into something fundamental about how the world is put together that makes it worthy beyond technique.See, life will break down, sometimes for no other reason than someone changed his mind about a deal and pride. It will break and scatter in pieces, go through the cycle of suffering. The film ends with everything broken, nothing put back together, the girl having left off for a next life somewhere.What it plumbs is that what we see into these makes a difference. There's abandonment at the end, heartbreak, anonymous loss of a soul that we knew as dear. But I would rather see courage myself. Instead of projecting our human terror into him, take from his capacity to endure. If suffering isn't pain, it's not being able to abide pain; how about there is nothing lost, nothing broken, there is only a time for things to come together and a time to disperse again? Balthazar isn't lost, he has returned, or so it goes maybe.

Anthony Iessi Bresson is a man of action, and in many respects a man who fears God. His films bravely and magnificently represent real life, in the best way the French New Wave was able to do. It's about using real people, and real events to make realistic films. In terms of the religious implications within his films, they are as Catholic as movies come. All of his films represent saints in sinners, and how sinners can be offered redemption for their bad deeds. In a sense, he was definitely a precursor to Martin Scorsese, who has made films about Catholic guilt through his entire career. The films of Bresson also include the unfortunate victims of a brutal, oppressive world, and the idea that one day, they may be rewarded or remembered as martyrs for their suffering on this earth. The film that captures this second idea in perhaps Bresson's most breathtaking way, is "Au Hasard Balthazar" It's the story of a woman, Marie, and her childhood donkey, Balthazar. Together, Bresson shows to us the parallel of two vulnerable beings, and the world lets them down one person at a time. The two are mistreated by the exact same troupe of bad people. One of which is the boyfriend, Gerard, whom Marie cannot stop falling for, despite the fact that he uses her to his perverted advantage any chance he gets. She can't get past his leather-bound good looks, and as a result, she becomes Gerard's toy. Gerard has an equally disturbing relationship with Balthazar as well. Once scene is particular shows Gerard mercilessly lighting Balthazar's tale on fire, in order to make him move quicker on the trail to deliver bread along the French country side. Other people who turn up to hurt Balthazar and his owner, would be a perverted town drunk who kidnaps Balthazar and enters him into the circus, while desperately trying to sleep with Marie in his home once she decides to run away from home and stay at a strangers house. Once more, and again, Balthazar and Marie cannot escape the tragedy that surrounds their life. This is where the likeness to Catholicism comes in. Consider the story of Jesus Christ, and how he suffered and died for the sins of man, in order to become their savior. To Catholics, those who suffer are those whom we should respect, and by the end of the picture, we find ourselves more than just respective of Balthazar. Even the characters of the story refer to him as a "Saint". Of course, what comes to mind is the last scene of the film, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful in the history of cinema. Balthazar is seen surrounded by a flock of sheep, as he passes away peacefully in a field. Bresson magnificently uses his cinematography to capture the animal with a saintly aura. Sheep, also as you know, have much to do with the Bible, and it is assumed that Baltazar, though being a donkey, is as holy as a lamb. I adored this movie. Much like "Diary of Country Priest" the realism of the characters and scenes absolutely touched me. In regards to each of the characters, as typical of Bresson, they don't seem like actors, but strange people that we all know ourselves. From the quiet and restless Marie, to the rebellious, lout Gerard, we know these people, and Bresson makes it very easy to allow us to root for and detest whom we want to. I felt much sympathy, and pity for these people, for they kept falling into the same horrible mistakes, plunging themselves deeper into their own abyss. Marie is such a lost soul, and a misguided young woman. By the end of the picture, she is seen weeping in a corner, completely naked, presumably beaten by her boyfriend Gerard. It's the same kind of abuse that Bresson wants us to associate Balthazar with, but unlike an Animal that wouldn't know any better, Marie should've known much better. But in the end, like the good Catholic in me, I forgave her. "Father, please forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Bresson pulls on our heartstrings and leaves us devastated by the end of "Au Hasard Balthazar", but it is a remarkably cleansing experience to watch. In Bresson's unique and powerfully real way, he makes us care so much for a simple donkey.

lreynaert The main character in this harsh movie is an animal, a donkey (Balthazar), whose fate lies in the hands of his masters. In a world full of naked violence, economical exploitation, cheating, sadism and rape, only one family treats Balthazar correctly. Its members will pay the price for it. The donkey is the only really innocent living being in this world; indeed, a saint.Robert Bresson's main obsession was not to shoot 'theatre' scenes. The element 'actor' in his movies was turned into a kind of set piece. All sorts of emotion had to be suppressed, because being 'theatrical'. But, his view was too rigid. Slightly more emotion, more lively dialogues or more passionate gesticulation would have made his movies 'warmer', more human, more moving. Notwithstanding this, his film is still an astonishing masterpiece. A must see for all movie buffs.

Robin Kluger Vigfusson Aside from the actors being forced by Bresson to give self-consciously impassive performances, the whole premise of the picture is false and tortured. Bresson makes a donkey a metaphor for saintly Christian behavior and by imposing his religion on nature, Bresson, himself, is contemptible and grandiose. Animals are pure beings for the very fact that they are outside of man made dogma. They are creatures of intuition and emotion who often seem far more moral than human beings steeped in the kind of theology Bresson wants to extol, here.I know I'm in the minority, but I think, for the very reason Bresson forced his own world view onto innocent Balthazar, the movie is a failure. For me, the only moving scene was the climax where dying Balthazar seeks out a herd of sheep for comfort. These animals are as pure and unassuming as he is for the very reason that they have no religion or agenda, unlike the film's director.