Au Hasard Balthasar

Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar is a film chronicling the misadventures of a saintly donkey named Balthasar. People either despise this film as high-toned pretentious kitsch or swoon at its brilliance. Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011) is a glossy Hollywood multiplex version of Bresson’s concept – Spielberg’s movie is an episodic historical epic about a beautiful stallion’s adventures in the Devon countryside and France during World War I. The movie is very popular with audiences – I saw the picture in a theater jammed with people – but, for some reason, it left me cold, even a bit depressed. As one might expect, the picture is fabulously beautiful. Everything is inflated to slightly mythic proportions. The evil landlord is the epitome of all evil landlords dating back to Victorian melodrama. (In fact, much of the film resembles the naïve theatrics of a production by D. W. Griffith). The peasant farmer is the essence of all peasant farmers and his hard-bitten, heroic wife is an archetype – she is the ultimate doughty, self-sufficient, loving, nurturing peasant wife and mother. The battle scenes are impressive but, also, spectacularly pretty – the hideous trenches are horrible in just the exact right proportion of visionary gloom and doom and squalor. Like Bresson’s picture, the human beings in the film are secondary to the narration about the animal. It’s the horse’s story that propels the action – although, from time to time, Spielberg’s human characters briefly appropriate the stage. The movie is curiously asexual – the horse seems to have no gender, although it’s apparently male. There’s some brief violence, after the manner of Saving Private Ryan, but its curiously remote. The horse and his destiny is the only thing at stake and we know that Spielberg isn’t going to murder this gorgeous animal. Parts of the film are quite effective and there are genuinely moving scenes – emotional powerful in a standard Hollywood kind of way: you’re not ambivalent, the picture shows you what to feel and you simply follow Spielberg’s excellent (if sometimes whorish) guidance. In this way, the film differs from Au Hasard Balthasar which is continuously confusing – you don’t know whether to hate Bresson’s bizarre hybrid of National Velvet and Dostoevsky or love it. Several sequences in War Horse are completely “over to top.” A reunion at the end of the film takes place in lurid, orange-red sunset that makes the closing scenes of Gone with the Wind look pallid by comparison. Not surprisingly, the picture begins and ends with auction scenes, revealing that Spielberg’s real interest in the film is completely mercantile. (On second thought, a better comparison to War Horse is one of David Lean’s staid, late epics, something like Dr. Zhivago, but with Lara played by a horse.)