December 4, 2008

Au Hasard Balthazar: A most powerful movie

Though not well-known to the general public in the US, Au Hasard Balthazar is one of the best movies ever made. As the name suggests, it's a French movie. It was directed by Robert Bresson and released in 1966.

So much has been written by movie and art critics about this movie and Bresson that it's hard to say anything new. I focus my attention to the last 10-15 minutes, the final scene of the movie that made me cry like nothing ever has. There is no music in the final scene. All you see is a donkey on a gently sloping grassy hill (like Kentucky's rolling hills) move about, sit down and die. No words are spoken and you see the donkey die, while other animals around it go on with their business. I saw it and I thought to myself if that's how I would die. We all have to go one day; would we go without even a whimper, all alone, having accomplished nothing to look back upon -- not leaving any legacy, anything behind us. Go that way after a life of cruelty that the world inflicted on us, not fighting back, moving around like a dust speck that hovers and wafts in the slanted shafts of morning sunlight, coming to rest no idea where? Who even thinks about it?

It was a really powerful moment. I understand the whole movie is allegorical, and I am not religious, but the sheer force of those moments stayed with me. And I decided to spend more time with my family, to listen more to others, to see if I can enrich my life as well as those of others. It's a little bit like the lines from T. S. Eliot's poem named A Song for Simeon

...
Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come ?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

...