Film Reviews: My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Part 1)

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

Written and Directed by Robert Bresson

Vagabond (1985)           

Written and Directed by Agnès Varda

Well, dear readers. I have been able to keep up my live performance reviews until now, but with Broadway and the NY arts scene shut down, like the rest of you I have  been confined to a world of online work, novels, and film. Luckily, the Criterion Channel exists, providing a rich source of fine films that can keep the cinephile occupied indefinitely. With some time on my hands, I thought this would be a good opportunity to revisit some of the great films resident in my memory-banks. Are they really as good as I remembered? And do they remind me of other films I might have seen in intervening years? So we will see how many editions this memory-lane film retrospective lasts--I will continue until live performances return! Here we go with Part 1.

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was the grandfather of the French New Wave of the 1960s. Arrogant, domineering, scornful of other lesser directors, he had an unwavering confidence in his own unique genius. He was revered by younger French directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and was one of the originators of the cult of the auteur that controlled minutely every aspect of a film from writing to directing to editing.  Bresson believed that film should be its own, absolutely integral art form, distinct from theater, visual art, opera, etc. He devised specific techniques to ensure that he was not producing “filmed plays”, which he loathed and felt was the essence of 99% of movies. So, for example, he used no professional actors, preferring amateurs he could hyper-control by making them do take after take, until they were so worn down that they finally displayed the unaffected naturalness that he sought. This produces a very odd affect when you see his films. Initially it seems underacted to the point of boredom, with uninflected, undramatic delivery of lines. But then you gradually realize that you are seeing a reflection of reality, not acted reality. Ditto his visuals. Watch the opening of Au Hasard Balthazar (Balthazar at Random), as we see our protagonist, the donkey Balthazar as a baby, surrounded by sheep and their bells (remember that sound, just like the sounds of my hikes in the Alps). He is taken in by a local family, and baptized by the children, but watch Bresson’s unique style during the baptism--we do not see the faces of the people, only their hands, and views outside the house are clouded by a grainy window. Also note at 2:00 in the clip the first appearance of the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major, a recurring theme used at key moments throughout a film, providing an emotional underlining to a film that mostly has no background score except for the sounds of nature. We actually first meet this beautiful piano work in the credits, in which Bresson condenses the entire affect of the film as a sort of orchestral prelude (make sure you watch through the first minute to get the full effect!).

Bresson tries to use film to capture true reality, not cinematic reality. In Bresson’s films we are in a room, see the doors open, a character exit, then watch the door closing behind them with a paused view of the closed door, just as we might if we were actually  in the room. On a busy street, we see the legs of the passing people, but not their faces (that’s what Bresson said that he looks at, head down, as he walks in the city). Watch this make-out scene of two awkward teenagers, and the balance between ultra-restrained faces and darting eyes and probing hands  . We even get the Schubert, and, of course Balthazar iconically nearby. All this is Bresson’s way of trying to use film to capture truth, reality and spirituality at the same time.

What is this film about? Well, the life of the donkey Balthazar, but not in any Americanized Lassie or Mr. Ed sort of way. Balthazar provides a spiritual center of the film, with a moving cast of people ranging from tawdry to profound to sociopathic circling around him. We see a very routine plot of teenagers robbing, smuggling goods and raping a local girl, rather like a plot of a 1950’s B movie, but somehow, Bresson keeps bringing Balthazar back as a Christ-like center that makes us see these human activities and drama as trivial when juxtaposed with certain Balthazar-like deeper truths. Bresson was raised a Catholic and rejected much of that church’s formal teaching, but kept searching for spiritual meaning in life. In many ways Au Hasard Balthazar is his greatest film—what better way to hyper-control an actor than use a non-human one? Even there, he complained in an interview some years later that the donkey was becoming too “expressive” and demonstrative by the end of filming, and less “restrained and natural”.

The ending of the movie, as we actually see Balthazar die amid a beatific flock of sheep, is one of the great movie endings ever (perhaps alongside the end of the world in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, set to music of Wagner). Watch it here. We are high in the mountains. Balthazar has been wounded (another Christ image), and his human tormentors have fled (the disciples run). We are left with just the donkey and sublime nature. But now there’s the sound of sheep again, now in the distance. They approach. We barely see the shepherd (Balthazar is The Shepherd). They surround the fading Balthazar. Then at 1:35 back comes the Schubert, escorting the donkey from life, but only for playing for 40 seconds, with the film ending with just the sound of the sheep bells. Wow. This is one of the more unlikely films to describe, yet it really works and always lingers in my thoughts for weeks afterwards whenever I see it.

An odd cousin of this great film is Vagabond (originally titled Sans toit ni loi (Without Shelter or Law). This is a striking film from 1985 from the great French director Agnès Varda (1938-2019).  This feminist film follows a ruthlessly, brutally independent teenage girl Mona as she backpacks her way around a rural area working odd jobs, sleeping with random men, and rejecting any real human connections. Varda does not share Bresson’s spirituality in this film, which is coldly realistic, literally. It begins with our seeing her dead frozen body in a ditch, and at the end we watch her freeze to death, a symmetry of despair rather than of Bresson’s spiritual optimism. Yet there are many similarities in the two films. Varda hired an 18-year-old neophyte actress Sandrine Bonnaire to play the lead. She in on-film every minute, and achieves a transparent naturalism that has much more dramatic range than Bresson’s catatonic non-actors, yet feels very real.  Oddly, after seeing the Bresson film, I felt that Varda used her teen protagonist Mona in the same way as Bresson used his donkey. The world and its perverse characters circle around Mona and are all affected by her (the characters are interviewed about their memories of her after she is found dead, as would occur in a news broadcast). As in Bresson, we see the tortured lives of the inhabitants with Mona as a lens. The film is relentlessly cold and brutal, and lacks the uplift of Au Hasard Balthasar, but in her own gritty way I think Ms. Varda was trying the same thing as Bresson. Perhaps we should judge ourselves by how we interact with the lowest of society—whether a donkey or a dirty vagabond.