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| Courtesy of Janus Films |
A bit of a reworking of the even more
renowned French auteur Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar
which is widely regarded as one of the most important films ever made, both
pictures chronicle a spotty, episodic journey of a donkey being passed around
owners or running into criminal gangs which rough it up. While ostensibly a sad song for an abused
animal, both films intersperse anecdotes of human drama which loosely connects
with the central animal and form a kind of allegorical tapestry of the human
condition.
In recent years, there have been a certain amount of
passionate director driven remakes of renowned classics whether domestic or foreign
that have been met with some skepticism but over time are reassessed as indelible
answers to said masterworks. Take for
instance Werner Herzog’s remake of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or William
Friedkin’s Sorcerer remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of
Fear.
The idea of remaking an
already perfect film is almost inevitably ballyhooed on some level, but over
the years cineastes have come to regard the remakes as of equal value to the
films that inspired them with enough ingredients to separate them from the
source. At once technically a retelling
of a perfectly told story as well as a means for an accomplished new auteur to
put their own stamp on it, the director driven remake of a classic can and
often does yield some extraordinary results.
While in the past the Movie Sleuth has pitted kindred
spirits together in a duel to the death to see who will win the Movie Battle,
in the case of Au Hasard Balthazar and EO the two films feed off
of each other and answer as well as pose questions about one another that keeps
the dialogue going. If nothing else,
both movies assail a similar topic of interest from vastly different angles
with one staying firmly grounded in reality while the other leaps freely in and
out of dreamy surrealism.
One is told as
an elegant and involved human drama involving the animal, the other is a kind
of psychedelic POV perspective from the donkey itself incidentally encountering
human characters. All in all, both are
masterworks and the Movie Sleuth is here to try and better understand what
makes these donkey films tick.
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
French director Robert Bresson is widely regarded as one of
the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, channeling his own life experiences of hardship
as a prisoner of war during WWII and his own understanding of Catholicism and
art in general. Something of a French
Ingmar Bergman, Carl Theodor Dreyer or Andrei Tarkovsky, Bresson’s work paints
in broad brushstrokes the landscapes on which all animal and human life on Earth
is in some way or another connected to God or spirituality. All throughout his career he has dealt in
difficult moral topics while also wrestling with questions of dignity and nobility
and none present a greater quandary for the viewer than his 1966 celebrated
donkey drama Au Hasard Balthazar.
The donkey is
then given to other farmers who work it to near death and frequently whip or
beat the animal when it disobeys. From
here the donkey, after getting into an accident, escapes and finds its way back
to Marie only to be given away once again in what becomes a succession of
disparate episodes as Balthazar finds itself passed around from owner to owner,
each one more abusive than the last.
Said to be loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The
Idiot with each disparate encounter in Balthazar’s life structured around
the Seven Deadly Sins, Au Hasard Balthazar is about the folly and
degradation of human life pitted against the pure and noble innocence of animal
life and trying to find some measure of spiritual meaning amid it all.
Though populated with human characters, the
film frequently cuts back to Balthazar in all of its beauty and pain from human
mistreatment and over time there’s a kind of Christlike allegorical context
being layered upon Balthazar. Visually
the film is ornate and even kind of glistens despite taking place on often
rough ragged terrain, lensed beautifully by Ghislain Cloquet and aided by a
somber piano score by Jean Wiener who makes the endurance of Balthazar oddly
touching.
One of the ways this is conveyed when it
intersperses between the perpetually feuding human characters and the donkey
being beaten down but still mustering up the strength to carry on despite
whatever is done to it. Balthazar
remains pure despite being a simple creature being tormented by human captors
and the film evolves into a kind of parable about finding grace when all seems
lost.
Initial reactions to the film were mixed with Jean-Luc
Godard praising it effusively while Ingmar Bergman (whose own work has much in
common with Bresson) disliked the film outright. Still, the film’s allegorical content and
presentation of the human experience through the prism of a wild animal’s experience
through life and death remains profoundly moving emotionally as well as
intellectually.
Upon initial release at
the Venice Film Festival it won the International Catholic Organization for
Cinema award and in the years since it is regarded as one of the greatest films
of all time and paved the way for other like-minded animal-human dramas
including but not limited to Todd Solondz’s sardonic Wiener-Dog. Seen now the film remains a remarkable
achievement conveying the human struggle through the eyes and ears of an Equus,
a film about accepting fate while also maintaining one’s integrity and dignity
through it all.
As EO bumps into a
young Italian priest (Lorenzo Zurzolo), a bourgeois countess (legendary actress
Isabelle Huppert) and briefly intermingles with a Polish soccer team, the journey
evolves into a mostly wordless first-person POV experience as we see through
donkey-vision both in fish-eyed lenses and deep pulsating neon reds, boiling
more and more down into abstract minimalist pure cinema while amping up the
emotional weathers.
Streaming now on Criterion Channel, the film is at once a
retelling of Bresson’s tale while also being a completely new from the ground
up journey with its own unique cinematic language of sight and sound. Much like Skolimowski’s English language The
Shout, the film is a big unexpurgated pile dump of sensory overload both
elegantly quiet and deathly deafening.
Sequences mid-stride will break apart into their own abstractions of
color and light, slow motion and high-speed photography, rendered exquisitely
by Michal Dymek with deep bombastic sonic pulsations by Pawel Mykietyn. Structurally speaking, the film is a less
punishing but equally emotional Au Hasard Balthazar by way of the animal
documentaries Gunda or Cow where the camera presses right against
the head or face of the animal or is Snorricam attached to the animal’s
body. Cut together, the film is like a
concerto of pure cinema asking us to reexamine a renowned classic in a new
context.
Undoubtedly one of the very best films of last year and an
indelible contribution to world cinema from one of its greatest purveyors, the
cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski while celebrated still remains largely undiscovered
in the US. Hopefully with the help of
Criterion Channel who are hosting both movies on their site coupled with the
Oscar nomination, that will change and filmgoers can dive into one of Poland’s
most wholly original and confident masters.
With EO, perhaps the filmmaker’s most challenging project of his
career, Skolimowski who cited Au Hasard Balthazar as the only film to ever
make him cry presents a deeply bold, astounding piece of pure cinema that takes
what we think we know about a renowned classic and breathes unexpectedly fresh
and new life into it.
--Andrew Kotwicki