Watch Au Hasard Balthazar For Free

Best movie ever!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

To read through most reviews of Balthazar feels like having stepped inside a church with people sighing about god and transcendence, which is a testament to Bresson's power here in his most spiritual work so far. But let me step outside in clear air for a moment.It was an ongoing project for him, striving for an ascetic eye that purifies. He had began (essentially) with Diary of a Priest, ambitious work about a spiritual journey. But I believe he was troubled by a few things in it, if his next films offer any clue.He spent the next couple of films completely muting the emotional turmoil evident in Diary, taking all the romanticism out, making them purely about the desire to break free from a prison-world. Pickpocket and Jeanne D'Arc were sketches in that austere direction. But this was setting him down a disastrous path where the only thing purer was was just more and more bare. When does fasting become starving and why is a stone floor purer than a furnished house? How about we say that his desire to evoke the abstract was laudable, but his dogmatic way of doing it absolutely killed the world in which it lives and hides? His camera murders it. It only managed to take the pure out of life and make a liturgy around its dead body. It was destroying the possibility for cinematic space to support metaphor, inner life, poetry, and to simply be anything other than dead nature. The process of facts alone won't do, they can never convey life, much less pure life. So I had my sights set on Balthazar as his most pure, most lauded, and expected perhaps to mount a critique of a spirituality that is only its own funeral. But I believe he beat me to the punch. I believe he began to see that he was starving himself, at least so far as the film is different from before.This is his most lush, his most ambitious since Diary (none of the interim were), his most accomplished and with the most life. His camera doesn't just stare, it moves again and searches. He doesn't just create ellipsis within a scene, he makes it move across the narrative. A household collapses, but we move to see this in the girl's disastrous relationship with a despicable bully, and we experience the loss of innocence, the fouling of kindness in her world, in Balthazar's treatment at the hands of several callous owners.At the center Bresson has the most placid, most unassuming actor, a selfless being. It's by reading what we do in Balthazar's eyes that we color the whole and it ripples through and becomes ours. We have the reactions he doesn't and thus humanize ourselves. It's marvelous and it plumbs into something fundamental about how the world is put together that makes it worthy beyond technique.See, life will break down, sometimes for no other reason than someone changed his mind about a deal and pride. It will break and scatter in pieces, go through the cycle of suffering. The film ends with everything broken, nothing put back together, the girl having left off for a next life somewhere.What it plumbs is that what we see into these makes a difference. There's abandonment at the end, heartbreak, anonymous loss of a soul that we knew as dear. But I would rather see courage myself. Instead of projecting our human terror into him, take from his capacity to endure. If suffering isn't pain, it's not being able to abide pain; how about there is nothing lost, nothing broken, there is only a time for things to come together and a time to disperse again? Balthazar isn't lost, he has returned, or so it goes maybe.

I don't really feel that Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is a very good film at all.The concept of a film where an ever present animal is the visual focus of various social interactions happening around it is a good one, but this film just doesn't get the job done, in my opinion.The whole film is filled with snippets of scenarios, none of which in themselves tell a coherent story about the characters, or the issues involved. Even trying to arrange these story fragments, after the fact, as one would try to fit together the pieces of a puzzle into a coherent whole, I just can't come up with anything that can make sense of this film for me.The only sensible constant in the film is the ever present donkey, but SO WHAT? If I want to look at a donkey for 90 minutes, then I can just go to the zoo.Furthermore, the brutal and neglectful treatment of the donkey in this film is just despicable. I myself find no value in watching an animal get abused in the way that the donkey in this film did. I highly doubt that, in these "politically correct" times, this film could even be made today . The outcry of the "animal rights" people would be too loud. Although I myself don't subscribe to "militant political correctness" in general, in the case of this film, I would agree that the portrayal of the brutal and neglectful treatment of this innocent animal has no place this film.Overall, I must say that, in my opinion, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is just another case of a true "pseudo-classic", a film whose intrinsic merits fall far short of the vaunted cinematic pedestal of film fan worship upon which it has sat for many years.

Director Robert Bresson amazes here by coaxing an extremely moving performance from a donkey named Balthazar. By comparison, the humans around him appear stubborn, shallow, cruel, and mercenary. We gain a troubling picture here of the indifference of nature, and the ultimate aloneness of the innocent. The final scene of this film is heartbreaking! Running counterpoint to Balthazar's story are the complicated comings and goings of various humans, none of whom is very likable. We focus on the dour Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), who rebels against her sheltered lifestyle by sleeping with a sinister young hood (Walter Green) and sells her body when necessary. We also follow, for reasons that aren't terribly clear, the peregrinations of an unappealing bum named Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert). Now that I have seen this intriguing film, along with "Diary of a Country Priest," I'm interested in viewing anything else that Bresson has directed. What a unique perspective he brings!

Just purchased a used copy at work and saw the film last night, for the second time. It reconfirmed for me what I suspected upon an initial viewing- that it's one of the four or five greatest films I've ever seen. That sounds like hyperbole from a guy with an MFA in film studies, but its far from a radical statement. While Bresson is woefully under-represented even in most film schools (at least in the U.S.) he is considered by many a hard-core cineast among the greatest in the pantheon of auteur's, and many think this his highest accomplishment. Godard called it "the world in 90 minutes" so I think that tells you something. Bresson started out as a painter, and I think what is so unique about this film is the way it has a narrative power different than that of any film I've ever seen. Indeed, it seems more like the "still" narrative of a painting, like that of a Caravaggio or a Rembrandt. It's not narrative in the sense of a "beginning, middle, and end" because its truths- the fleeting joys and predominate pain of life and death- are so universal that we know them, on some level, before we witness the work. But art-works of such grandeur illuminate what we take for granted and make life seem, again, like a transcendent drama.