Au Hasard Balthazar is only the first of four times where Bresson borrows from Russia. Though one finds moments of saintliness – as when Balthazar observes the animals around him cage other animals for base amusement – it’s still without the exultation of Dostoevsky’s verses. It’s intended to pronounce the absurdity of mankind, but it doesn’t elevate Balthazar’s asceticism. Only when all sins have taxed their dues, and Balthazar finds his resting place amongst unassuming sheep, do we hear a tinge of melancholy through Schubert’s Piano Sonata No.20 (which makes its way into Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, who happened to place Au Hasard Balthazar at 21st in the directors’ poll). However, the music isn’t exclusive to the final scene – it occurs throughout the film; when he eats grass as Marie spurns her final chance at peace with Jacques, when she initiates an unstable love with Gerard, and when he turns away from an obligatory pail of water. Death has fortunately relieved him from life’s gift of contorting imprisonment. Despite all these strong undercurrents of abdication, Au Hasard Balthazar falls short of completing what Bresson may have intended.
Is Au Hasard Balthazar the most Bressonian film? I feel that this question is inadequate from the perspective of a director’s evolution. Yes, there is a mark that makes a film uniquely Bresson’s, and this is true from the Angels of Sin to L’Argent. Nonetheless, the elements that complete his film are different with each work – in Balthazar, he uses Schubert; in L’Argent, he uses no one. His views on the role of sound in a film held more sway in his later years, and as a result, in 1983, one could say that his most recent film was the most Bressonian. The rigor of the camera is indispensable in Bresson’s works and I’ve never seen it falter as yet, so from the regard of the cinematograph, Au Hasard Balthazar is certainly a work that only Bresson can lay claim to. Schubert is perhaps necessary to render Balthazar as the concentric nexus of the film, and in all other regards, one doesn’t find much lacking in the instructions of a director. What I do find lacking is the factor of time; the film could have profited from an extended exposure of Marie, who seems to weigh heavily within it yet moves so little through it.
Bresson’s style of film-making may already put some viewers ill at ease. It’s more than a gentle exfoliation and less than a branding. He certainly isn’t a filmmaker who compromises length or treatment for his viewers, but why does Au Hasard Balthazar feel incomplete? Every individual who passes through the film is a sufficient representation of a respective sin. They appear, exact, and depart as swiftly as they arrived. Some linger, some don’t – like vices do in life. But Marie contends with Balthazar for primacy. We see her and Balthazar ceremonially exchange unspoken vows and grow up in the same landscape. When she dies unseen and he dies on a mountain, I felt that her death was ushered in even before one could observe her mercurial nature, all while sensing that she was equally proportionate in this narrative to her partner from birth. Her significance burns too quickly and detracts from his as it wanes.
Inverting this from what is seen to what was intended may aid interpretation. Bresson worried that Balthazar may mistakenly be perceived as parallel to the story and not central to it. The origins of this problem then may be a result of how he approaches his direction. Bresson storyboards the entire film mentally and proceeds to shoot with the vague tangents of his efforts. He reiterates that it is hard for him to pinpoint the source of each character and is only cognizant of their sin and its laceration on Balthazar. It is perhaps through this process, which renders the film its quality, did he impute a significance to Marie that he didn’t wholly fulfil nor duly cut. Had he intended for the film to be centered around his non-human saint, then he failed to do the latter. If his intention was otherwise and he wished for the narrative circles of these two characters to overlap, he failed in the former. Throughout the film, Marie swells in importance before being relegated to the troupe of characters. Her noncommitment isn’t so much a problem as is her disappearance. Had she existed above the shadows longer than her stay in them, the film would have been Bresson’s greatest; a pensive meditation on the exacting nature of desire that is fortunately not possessed by other beings. It would have achieved such aspirations, but it may not be what Bresson intended – with Balthazar as its irrefutable center.
The longer I look at it, the more it becomes clear. Balthazar is uniform and sans vice. His narrative, hurtled straight through the film, reflects all that humanity disgorges onto him. He is a self-abnegating entity that bears witness to the convolutions of birth, growth, and decay while going through it himself, without ever attaining malice. However, he is born alongside Marie, and she’s shown to be moving on the same path, fallible to all that humans are fallible to. Yet, we only see her whimsical choices and downtrodden purity in flashes. A human’s contortions need more exposition than that of an animal’s rectitude, and to play the card of temporal equilibrium isn’t going to do justice to these parallel narratives. If indeed Balthazar is to be indisputably central to the film, Marie’s intimacy and inextricability with him should have been gelded or there should have been another set of sequences to show her reacting to every newfound tribulation.
It may seem that I’m too critical of Bresson. This is, however, a rare occasion. I’ve never seen the layer of an animal’s spirituality explored in the Western world. In many Eastern practices, it is common to perceive animals as divine manifestations and abodes of spirituality. Beyond the mere endurance of man’s abrasion, they are devoid of what completes, and more importantly, what corrupts us. In this marriage of Bresson’s transcendence and Balthazar’s saintliness, I felt that some of his fears were true. This is not to say that he didn’t achieve his objective. Balthazar is certainly omnipresent and is constantly watchful. He reminds me of the heedful man that Kieslowski intersperses across his Dekalog. Bresson couldn’t have done more to depict an animal that has no vices to defeat and as a result is more exalted than the rest of mankind. It is what clamps onto the narrative through Marie that undermines the film.
Bresson inches closer to his complete negation of music in his final films with Au Hasard Balthazar; his usage of sounds here is however a departure from his future films. Unlike in L’Argent and Mouchette where he lends the film its original ambience, he juxtaposes noises of the modern world with those of the countryside steeped in torpor. We see them continue in Mouchette, yet their invitation here is particularly boisterous. Gerard’s transistor, the honking scooters, and the flying shards of glass that fall like confetti around a seemingly lost generation are in sharp contrast with the village itself. It’s unusual for the rigid enclosures of tranquillity in Bresson’s filmography, but the purpose was perhaps to herald the end of that world; a world where one can no longer hear larks or partridges.
As always, Bresson inspires an ineffability in me. Though Au Hasard Balthazar falls short due to no fault of its random and eponymous character, it is still a representation of the world in an hour and a half as Godard called it. It sees men grow with blithe indifference for others, learning to soon differentiate, despise, and finally denounce the world and live in seclusion like the miser. All this to take place, only for us to realize the cold hollowness of our bones without the warmth of another. Balthazar realizes this too, yet he would rather let his throat be parched than drink from the conditional pail of water offered to him. For this, and for more, he is a saint.
