DVD Review: Au Hasard Balthazar - Page 4

The donkey is then sold on the open market to the town’s miserly merchant (Pierre Klossowski), a loner who loves pelf and loathes humans. The man whips Balthazar relentlessly to turn a well drill. Marie then shows up at night, in a rainstorm, after she has apparently been dumped by Gerard. Now, with no real reason but her warped sexuality, she determines to seduce the old man, after taking food from him. One thinks, at first, she is there for Balthazar, but she seems now too far gone. She barely notices her old animal, much less displays any emotion for it. She seduces the old man, and leaves, after he refuses to help her learn how to ‘run away.’ When he calls her parents, she is long gone, but the miser returns Balthazar to them, stating that it will please Marie.

Not long after, the self-loathing Marie is proposed to by Jacques, who has not been seen since he was rejected by her, early in the film, after offering to help her father with the debt he owed to his father. Marie scorns him, stating that she cares nothing of their names he carved on a bench, their childhood love of Balthazar, and that she lacks all emotion and empathy. To the astute observer, this fact of her personality was revealed by the film long before Marie’s self-realization. After scorning the better man, Jacques, she determines to ‘have it out’ with the lesser man, Gerard, once and for all. Ellipsis, and she is later found stripped and beaten, and possibly raped, shivering inside a locked room of a farmhouse.

After Jacques and her father break a window to retrieve her, there is another ellipsis. Bresson is taking out all the tricks in his cinematic bag now. Marie’s mother comes down the stairs to tell all that she is ‘gone.’ Many critics have assumed this means that she has either died from the beating, or has gone insane. But, noting the reaction of the mother, the father, and Jacques, this is clearly not so — there is no death-level grief. Jacques resignedly walks away. The mother withdraws into herself, and the father is taken ill, possibly with grief, but one also suspects guilt, from the looks on his face, to the incoherencies that he mumbles. It is here where the relationship between father and daughter is finally and manifestly bared as something twisted, in the least, and possibly deeply sick, in the extreme.

By contrast, the ‘beating’ left little scarring on Marie, whom we briefly see naked before being recovered by Jacques and her father, and there is no evidence of impending insanity. Marie is clearly not ‘normal,’ but insane? No. So, this means that her ‘running away’ is the likeliest option, and the only one consonant with the reactions of the other characters in the film. Again, she mentions this action as a desideratum throughout the film. Clearly, after several times trying to run away, Marie has now found her impetus, as even her once childish ties to Balthazar are gone from her soul. She even iterates this severance with the donkey when she chides Jacques for still pursuing her, and idealizing their connection as children. The film then ends with Marie’s father’s death; Gerard, and one of his gang, stealing Balthazar for the smuggling effort; and the aforementioned seeming death scene of the donkey, as a Franz Schubert piano piece plays. In a nice touch, the dark donkey is surrounded by the flock of white, which acts as almost a halo about its form.

Article Author: Dan Schneider

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