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.

...

The Sunlight on the Garden

I like poetry. I liked it even when I didn't understand it, because good poetry is like music -- you appreciate it by hearing it. I remember one poem that read a long time ago, and have never really forgotten, and it's not a highly fancied one or one that's often fed to students of classics and poetry. It was written by Louis MacNeice and is titled The Sunlight on the Garden.

I am reproducing it here. The first stanza is just beautiful.

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Beautiful, but vague. Like U2's lyrics. Hence timeless. Apparently, it was written by Louis after his wife had left him for someone else. If that influenced this work, the net effect is saddened. Even without that knowledge, the poem remains nostalgic, a tad wistful and jumps from one idea to another, thought it ends on a positive note. I have drawn pleasure and perhaps strength from it over many years, and at times I've felt that it contains infinite wisdom, constructed as it is with universal themes of loneliness, regret, alienation and acceptance.