Whether or not Au Hasard Balthazar is Bresson's masterpiece,
as some argue, it's definitely the best damn donkey movie ever
made. A rare animal picture that avoids dubious personification,
grating celebrity voiceovers, and stupid Big Race or Journey or
Reunion plotlines, Balthazar successfully evokes the difference
between animals and people by creating complex human characters
and an admittedly unknowable donkey, and documenting their casual
and direct, friendly and impersonal interactions. Balthasar's
life ends up resembling that of a typical picaresque protagonist,
as he's buffeted about by chance from master to master, and simply
perseveres. Non-oppressive Catholic symbolism abounds, for those
who care to track it, from Balthazar's early baptism to eventual
canonization, but the most resonant spaces in the film for pondering
Meaning are those pointing to the mysterious divide between people
and other animals. The scene where Balthazar is taken around to
"meet" his fellow circus animals and shares brief eye-to-eye
exchanges with a caged lion, polar bear, chimp, and elephant is
extremely moving, if totally inscrutable. Among Bresson's cast
of human actors, the luminous Anne Wiazemsky stands out in a much
more conflicted and interesting, frenchified version of the kid-who-loves-our-animal-hero
role, a weird cross between Elizabeth Taylor's disparate roles
in National Velvet and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?