(on Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar)
I do want to navigate a bit the spiritual — call it Christian if you will — dimension. How can one not, with the name itself, Balthazar (evoking one of the New Testament’s three wise men)? And, most importantly, there’s that final climactic scene, which contains a truly sublime cinematic image, incomparable, unexpected — where Balthazar, bleeding (he’s been accidentally shot by a customs officer), wanders in the countryside, and is surrounded suddenly by the whiteness of a herd of sheep, their bells tinkling. And it’s as if that whiteness, the purity, innocence there of the herd, could redeem — because he’s gone down to his knees, then fully — the blood sacrifice. Or is Bresson, when he incorporates Balthazar visually into the flock, underscoring what the latter has always been, a lamb of God, suffering, for himself? Others? One reviewer, Vittorio J. Carli for Reel Movie Critic, finds this film more “serious and profoundly religious” than Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. Many reviewers have commented on the same aspect. And yet, as with great art, there is often no one interpretation. James Quandt has an interesting take on this for the Criterion collection. He discusses the film’s purported spiritual dimension, does not dismiss it, but notes countervailing considerations that arguably put it alongside L’Argent.
