Synopsis
The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.
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Cast
- Anne WiazemskyMarie
- Walter GreenJacques
- François LafargeGérard
- Jean-Claude GuilbertArnold
- Philippe AsselinMarie's Father
- Pierre KlossowskiMerchant
- Nathalie JoyautMarie's Mother
- Marie-Claire FremontBaker's Wife
- Jean-Joël BarbierThe Priest
Recommendations
- 100
TV Guide Magazine
This great film, made with uncompromising honesty and devastating reality, is, according to Jean-Luc Godard, "the world in an hour and a half." - 100
Village Voice
To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers. - 100
Los Angeles Times
If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling. - 100
Chicago Tribune
1966 French masterpiece -- the finest, most deeply personal work of a filmmaker who has been compared, justifiably, to both Dostoyevsky and Bach. - 100
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The final scene of Balthazar's demise is one of cinema's most moving and haunting moments. - 100
Chicago Reader
Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed. - 100
Chicago Sun-Times
Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. - 100
Boston Globe
To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't.
