Donkey's Years

JACKASS, THE MOVIE: Wiazemsky and the donkey known as Balthazar.

Au Hasard Balthazar stars Robert Bresson's ultimate nonactor: a donkey.

by Sam Adams

The archetype of the dumb, plodding beast of burden, a donkey would seem an unlikely choice for movie stardom. But, A.A. Milne notwithstanding, few have seen donkeys the way Robert Bresson did. As he explains in Robert Bresson: Ni vu, ni connu, which precedes both International House screenings of his 1967 Au Hasard Balthazar, Bresson saw the donkey as "the most important, the most sensitive, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, the most suffering of animals."

Worth noting that for Bresson, the donkey's importance (to say nothing of its thoughtfulness or sensitivity) is tied to its suffering. Certainly, few creatures have borne as much onscreen abuse as poor Balthazar. Beaten, whipped, tormented, nearly set on fire, Balthazar kicks and brays, but most often he endures. As he passes from owner to owner, returning most frequently to the long-suffering Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), Balthazar meets humans whose own lives closely parallel his own. As Jean-Luc Godard, who would later marry Wiazemsky, remarked, Balthazar is not the movie's only donkey.

The similarity is hardly coincidental. In the Ni vu interview, conducted before filming on Balthazar commenced, Bresson said he intended to tell "the life of a donkey with the same stages as a man's." But his remark that the beast dies "carrying the sins of man" (in this case, gold being smuggled through the mountains) brings to mind a more divine antecedent, not least because only a few minutes have passed since Marie's mother proclaimed Balthazar "a saint." Unlike the hero of Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), whose crippling stomach ailment does not prevent him from facilitating a dying woman's divine reckoning, Balthazar seems to die with no good works to his name. His goodness, such as it is, consists largely of never having acted out of malice or spite.

Such negative virtues are characteristic of Bresson's work. The hourlong Ni vu, ni connu -- more of a position paper than an interview proper, as Bresson's 23-year-old interlocutor was supplied with questions Bresson had written in advance -- Bresson objects to the use of the term "cinema," which for him signifies filmed theater. Bresson's art, he says, is "cinematography," a bare, denuded term that strips away all but the most mechanical associations. So too, Bresson speaks of the importance of "automatism," in life and in art, those actions or associations that we complete without the use of our conscious mind. He speaks of his images being flattened, as if with an iron, and of his preference for nonactors, what he would later call "models." Such images, devoid of "facial expression or gestures," have a "very violent effect" on each other and collectively "take on another face." But Bresson doesn't elaborate on what that third, dialectically created face might reveal. He talks elaborately about what he doesn't want to do, and sparingly about what he does.

Following Bresson's lead, his critics have always derided his films as intellectualized and emotionally arid. But Balthazar, shown in a new, restored print, positively heaves with emotion, if not the directional arrows that tell an audience how to feel. It's hard to imagine anyone watching the scenes of Balthazar being beaten and not feel a twinge, not least because it's not always clear that the action has been faked. With his quick temper, sullen demeanor and gang of leather-jacketed toughs, François Lefarge's Gerard is an antagonist straight out of melodrama, brutalizing Marie, Balthazar and the alcoholic artist Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert) in turn. Often accompanied by the noise of a passing car, which shatters the small-town quiet with the same brutality as the gunshots in Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, Gerard is the destructive disregard of the modern world incarnate.

Yet Bresson is no mere nostalgist. It might seem indicative of Bresson's disdain for the modern world that his Lancelot of the Lake, released on DVD this week, chronicles the end of the Arthurian era, the dissolution of a sacred quest into adulterous infighting and revolt. But the movie begins with a brisk, bloody precis of the quest itself, followed by the heavily ironic opening titles proclaiming the "marvelous adventures" in which Lancelot played a "heroic part." So much for the good old days.

In a moment of rare clarity, the besotted Arnold, sensing that his death is near, bids goodbye to his "old friends," who are "condemned to stay here and watch the same idiots go by." That his audience consists of Balthazar, who has carried his lifeless body out of town, and a solitary telephone pole (the immediate object of his speech) does not lessen the moment's poignancy. On the contrary, no actor could capture the potent futility of Arnold's realization as well as the stark shot of that telephone pole against a gray, empty sky.

Au Hasard Balthazar Directed by Robert Bresson A Rialto release Fri.-Sat., May 28-29 International House