Au hasard Balthazar

Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar opened in 1966, and we would call it his greatest film. It entered the top ten of the Sight & Sound critics' poll in 2022, and working filmmakers have returned to it again and again; Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean-Luc Godard both held it up as one of the films that justified cinema as an art form. Anne Wiazemsky, the lead, was eighteen and acting for the first time. She married Godard the following year and became a central figure of the late-1960s French New Wave.

It follows the life of a small French donkey named Balthazar, passed from owner to owner across a Pyrenean village (the schoolgirl Marie who loved him as a foal, the cruel young drifter Gérard who breaks him, a miser who works him to exhaustion, a travelling circus, a smuggler), alongside the parallel course of Marie's own life, which becomes more and more bound up with Gérard's. Bresson treats Balthazar's eyes and ears as an impartial witness to human cruelty, and the donkey is a parable figure in the line of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which Bresson named as his structural model.

Bresson's non-professional actors, his patient withholding of conventional dramatic emphasis, and Schubert's Piano Sonata in A major, the film's only open acknowledgement of emotion, add up to one of the most deeply religious films ever made. It is about suffering, dignity and witness, and it does not ask its audience to share Bresson's own Catholic frame.