em-being
@em-being

tldr: this movie is pretty good if you like dramas and animals, but i'm not over the moon about it. anyway lets talk spoilers


There's a certain type of art movie that's a sort of cultural object of derision, the kind of black and white bleak piece of cinema that I remember as a kid seeing parodied rather inelegantly that's still kind of taking strays in the modern era. It isn't specific, really. You'll see it applied to neorealist fare like Bicycle Thieves and New Wave stuff like Breathless and something like Persona in the same broad brush. I assume it's just the inertia of ye olden times, when black and white European movies were the intelligentsia pick and everyone else was watching everything else. Honestly nothing much has changed on that front, still a lot of these movies cluttering up best of lists. The weight of culture is so immense. People discoursing about Jeanne Dielmann like its a movie anybody but turbo nerds have seen.

Which makes Au Hasard Balthazar hard to talk about, because frankly the coming of age drama of a girl and some shitty men in her life through the eyes of a donkey she rescued as a kid as a metaphor for Christ-like sacrifice all feeding back through the plight of The Woman in French cinema? My god, it's absolutely ludicrous. You couldn't design a sillier parody of this kind of movie in a lab. If you were going to bad faith dismiss a whole generation of movies, this is the movie you would think up.

But I liked it! I think the framing of Balthazar is genuinely good, allowing static shots of a donkey just existing to deflate the otherwise too-potent melodrama of having a criminal boyfriend and rocky social status. It carves a handsome little space for the audience to fill this animal with whatever they want, guided perhaps by where the animal is dropped into the narrative but allowed to load the donkey up with all their own thoughts and fears and emotional baggage. There's a whole type of art that exists mostly to be a mirror to the viewer, just directed enough to start a conversation but otherwise empty enough for you to fill it with all sorts of bullshit you want to unload into the time you spend with it. Those kinds of works have value. And I think my reaction to kind of scoff at it for being textually a bit ridiculous is part of its power, it's just a movie about a donkey and a girl and the passage of time. You must bring your own profundity. I wouldn't say I felt it, but it has a reputation for a reason! I just think some of the religiosity people pour into it is a little silly. Yeah Balthazar lays down with the sheep at the end, it's willing to meet you halfway, but there are plenty of actual works concerned with religiosity people could engage with instead. People are very scared of religiosity, however, so this diet version being very popular especially with critics does not especially surprise me. It's fine.

At the end of the day it's like a sad girl and her donkey that isn't really hers even and the donkey suffers because life is cruel mostly because boys are awful and then it gets shot and dies. It's not that big of a deal, cosmically. And that's okay. I had a decent time.


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