DVD Review: Au Hasard Balthazar - Page 2

After the film’s opening, which shows a young Marie with Jacques, the boy who will always love her - son of a local rich man - and a baby Balthazar that is the favorite plaything of the children, years pass, and Marie is now a girl in her teens, played by Anne Wiazemsky. There is clearly something ‘off’ about Marie, though. She is aloof, unresponsive to others’ touches and solicitations. Yet, she still connects to Balthazar deeply.

In many ways, the film chronicles her descent from normal child to disturbed young woman, and in doing so, chronicles her eventual disaffection from even her once beloved donkey. In a sense, Au Hasard Balthazar is an anti-love story, showing the slow breaking of bonds between two souls, human and animal. With each scene in the film, Marie gets more and more detached from reality, until, at film’s end, she’s a near total fruitcake. One of the central queries of the film is why is Marie so disturbed? The film never specifies why, as it does not specify much, leaving it up to the individual viewer; but I have more than an educated guess as to why, as I will explain later.

Suffice to say, the only things that seems to occupy her thoughts are her beloved donkey and the idea of running away from her natal environment. Her father (Philippe Asselin), the local teacher, is going through a rough financial time, accused of some sort of misdeed that is, naturally, never specified, and Marie is also very distant from her rather unformed mother (Nathalie Joyaut). Soon we meet the villain if the film, who is the antithesis to the noble Jacques (played by Walter Green, as a young man), who tries to help Marie’s father out of his fiscal strife with Jacques’ family. The villain’s name is Gerard (François Lafarge) — a budding psychopath, who, along with his nameless band of thugs (rural, French precursors to those depicted in A Clockwork Orange), commits crime after crime, sexually uses - then sexually abuses - Marie, violently abuses the donkey, routinely steals, berates, batters, and commits a host of other assorted lesser crimes. Perhaps the two cruelest acts he commits in the film are committed against Marie and the donkey — beating and possibly raping Marie with his gang, causing her to possibly finally lose touch with all reality, and earlier tying a newspaper around Balthazar’s tail, then lighting it aflame to get the animal to move.

This incident occurs when Gerard briefly takes ownership of the donkey, due to circumstances that force it to leave Marie’s family’s farm. When the donkey takes ill, it is about to be euthanized by Gerard’s clan, until the town’s drunk, and claimed murderer, Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert), takes the beast. There is a whole digression, once Gerard takes Balthazar from Marie, that introduces the audience to Arnold, a drunk suspected of murder. As with Marie’s father, we never find out what occurred, nor who was murdered, if anyone, although the screenplay, and Gerard’s gang’s behavior, suggest that Gerard and the gang are the killers (or, perhaps hoaxers who hold the claim against Arnold to manipulate and blackmail him), who have set up the drunkard, to torture him with accusations of guilt, just for the sadistic pleasure of it. Arnold fights back, but is beaten by the young thugs. He, however, is also abusive, to the donkey — beating it and a smaller donkey with a chair (not seen onscreen, though). On a trip into town, to buy some booze, Balthazar, who is with the smaller donkey, ambles away, and is found by a circus hand. Then, at almost the midway point of the film, comes one of the most remarkable passages in film history.

Article Author: Dan Schneider

Dan Schneider is the founder and webmaster of Cosmoetica: the best in poetica.

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