The Criterion Collection has released Bresson’s masterpiece, Au hasard Balthazar on DVD today; this review is for robert-bresson.com, which will publish our full review of the DVD shortly. –Doug

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The scholar C.H. Dodd once defined a parable as a “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application as to tease it into active thought.” Parables are thus distinguished from fables (which involve fantasy or myth) or allegories (which are highly symbolic with emblematic detail).

If Robert Bresson’s aesthetic of realist, material sounds and images assembled in paradoxical ways virtually defines the cinematic parable, Au hasard Balthazar (1966) may be his most inspired and moving expression of the form. Presenting parallel narratives juxtaposing the lives of a teenaged girl, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), with a donkey named Balthazar, the film is predicated on ellipses and reversals that occur between and within nearly every scene, confounding, subverting, and challenging viewer expectations. It’s a narrative film, but its comprehension is less a matter of connecting cause and effect than speculating on the bits and pieces of information it assembles together in puzzling and evocative ways.

The film has thus provided fertile ground for many thematic interpretations. Bresson himself acknowledged certain suggestions during the film’s release on the French television program Pour le plaisir (included with the Criterion DVD): “This character resembles the Tramp in Chaplin’s early films, but it’s still an animal, a donkey, an animal that evokes eroticism yet at the same time evokes spirituality or Christian mysticism, because the donkey is of such importance in the Old and New Testaments, as well as ancient Roman churches.”

And yet Balthazar is far from a theoretical or intellectual exercise. (“Ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas,” Bresson wrote in Notes on the Cinematographer. “Go to the persons and objects directly.”) The film’s surface textures–farmland, piles of hay, a wooden swing, a spartan bench–are as lovingly emphasized as its sonic textures–Balthazar’s braying, a creaking rope, various squeaking wheels. The film was shot by cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, following Bresson’s extraordinary four film collaboration with L.H. Burel, and it evokes the physical world with precise clarity. Combined with Bresson’s downward-glancing, opaque models and evocative silences, the film offers an astonishing, muted beauty. Cloquet had previously worked on such films as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955) and Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (1960), and would shoot Bresson’s two subsequent works.

The film’s sounds include a melancholy refrain from Schubert’s Sonata No. 20, and although Bresson later rejected the use of nondiegetic music altogether (and suggested Balthazar‘s accompaniment was “too sentimental”), the film’s music, like its imagery, provides effective counterpoint to its somber drama.

Counterpoint is the driving force of the film. In the opening credits alone, Schubert’s sonata is interrupted by a magnificent donkey bray. The first shot after the credits provides a composition of nature–a donkey colt suckling his mother–but a human hand intrudes from offscreen to pet the animal. Two children then ask an older man if they can have the colt and the man refuses; the next shot reveals the three of them leading the colt down a hill. The following scenes contrast the children playing on a farm (“baptizing” the donkey and naming him Balthazar) with a bed-ridden child who takes her medicine and quietly weeps. These gentle scenes then dissolve to a low angle shot of a man menacing the camera, cracking a whip with loud snaps on the soundtrack; it is years later and Balthazar is being put to work.

As Balthazar ages, so does Marie, and the bulk of the film presents her in adolescence, caught in the fragile period when childish things are cast aside, complex emotions are born, and serious decisions can derail a life before it has the chance to blossom. Wiazemsky, who later became a novelist, provides one of Bresson’s most compelling models, projecting a reserved and seemingly unconscious combination of passivity and rebellion, reticence and rashness. Her treatment of Balthazar is simultaneously caring and neglecting: in one scene, she adorns the animal with flowers and kisses it, in another she pathetically notes how the donkey shivers in the cold. Marie marks Bresson’s increasing interest in youthful protagonists, prefiguring Mouchette, Une Femme douce, and a series of teenagers in his late color period (filmed in his seventies and eighties); his sensitivity to their uncertain, paradoxical behaviors would always remain highly observant, empathic yet unsentimental.

Balthazar, Bresson’s most original script (one of his few films not adapted from a literary text), is the first film in which he begins to fully confront modern cruelty. His counterpoint to Balthazar’s innocence and beauty is Gerard, the gleefully sadistic hoodlum who abuses nearly everything he encounters. Bresson continually associates him with the growling sound of the delinquent’s moped and blaring transistor radio, two objects of modernity that violently penetrate the pastoral atmosphere. Gerard and his gang vandalize roads, terrorize Balthazar, and physically abuse Marie, who seems so resigned to her fate that she rejects the one character–her childhood friend Jacques–who offers her unconditional love. Gerard is offered perhaps the most devotion when he’s hired by the local baker, and the artisan’s wife secretly dotes over the youth in romantically ambiguous ways.

Throughout the film, Marie and Balthazar meet and diverge, seemingly at random (the film’s title translates as “By Chance, Balthazar”). Suggestions of plot flicker in the background: Marie’s father inherits a farm and takes great pride in putting it to use, but the old enemies of Bresson’s Country Priest–distrust and gossip–isolate him from his small community; a murder occurs that implicates Gerard and his gang as well as the town drunkard, Arnold (played by Jean-Claude Guilbert, who, uncharacteristically for Bresson, would be reused in the director’s next film); Balthazar is sold to various owners, all of whom invariably abuse the donkey as outward manifestations of unique vices.

When Balthazar is made to work as a circus performer, it provides Bresson with one of his most justifiably lauded sequences. Balthazar assists a worker who moves from cage to cage providing hay for a variety of exotic animals. As the man stops, doles out portions, and moves on, Balthazar stares silently ahead and the animals stare back; the scene is strictly representational, there is no anthropomorphic embellishment to it, yet through Bresson’s conspicuous editing, the animal world unites in its mystery and diversity. And although Balthazar’s central position in the narrative defines the donkey as a protagonist, Bresson preserves the animal’s inscrutable nature, balancing its remoteness with its responses to human behavior. (Bresson insisted on using an untrained donkey.) Like the film’s enigmatic characters and teasing narrative glimpses, Balthazar’s singular being is a summation of ambiguous details offered moment by moment.

The profundity of Balthazar–no doubt a primary reason why it was voted one of the top 20 films of all time in the 2002 Sight & Sound international poll–lies not in its fragments, however, but its overall harmony, the way Bresson fashions a sense of balance between suffering and beauty, will and passivity, exactitude and suggestion, chance and inevitability, life and death. His formal unity elevates the film to the highest artistic plane and its steady stream of contradictions appear as necessary truths, firmly placing the viewer between the knowable and the unknowable, the world that’s perceived and the world that’s hidden, intangibly ordered, and finally perhaps, revealed.

New Yorker Video have recently released Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) on DVD, and this review of the film will predicate our complete review of the DVD at www.robert-bresson.com shortly. –Doug

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For many, Robert Bresson’s final work, L’Argent (1983), is a perfect formal and thematic culmination of the filmmaker’s sporadic, but consistently provocative career. But its reception has always been mixed; at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, Bresson received a new prize (presented by Orson Welles)–the Grand Prix de CrÈation–which he shared with Andrei Tarkovsky (for Nostalghia), and members of the audience booed the 82-year old filmmaker over the accompanying applause. (Cannes footage was dropped from the MK2 DVDs that provided the source material for New Yorker’s disc, but the distasteful moment is preserved in De Boer and Rood’s 1984 documentary, The Road to Bresson.)

Self-appointed guardians of fashion had dismissed Bresson as a member of France’s vintage cinema rather than its contemporary cutting edge, but such a label could only have been applied by those unfamiliar with L’Argent‘s searing social critique and singular, fragmented poetry. Twenty-two years after its debut, it remains firmly embedded in the cinematic consciousness.

Although Bresson had previously adapted several works by Dostoevsky, L’Argent was adapted from a story by Tolstoy, “The Forged Coupon,” which depicts the suffering that ensues from the use of a counterfeit check. It was an “account of how evil spreads,” said Bresson, whose career had long identified a love of money as a primary human vice–from Michel’s “misadventures” in Pickpocket to the heartless miser in Au hasard Balthazar, to the suicide’s accomplice in The Devil Probably. And Tolstoy’s terse and direct prose seems ready-made for Bresson’s physical detail:

“After dinner the gymnasium student went back to his room, took the coupon and change from his pocket, and threw it on his desk; then he took off his uniform and put on a jacket. He picked up a worn Latin grammar text for a moment and then got up and locked his door. With a motion of his hand he swept the money off the desk and into a box, took some cigarette papers from the box, filled one with tobacco, rolled it up, and lit it.” (trans. David Patterson)

Further, Bresson connects the financial swindle (and the subsequent bribes to obscure it) with the idleness and isolation of the middle class; characters seem obsessed with the cult of beauty (several nude paintings and call girls feature in the early scenes), resurfaces as an oblivious businessman reading his newspaper stumbles into a bank robbery, and continues through an assortment of businesspeople and law enforcers who misinterpret events.

“[M]y film is about today’s unconscious indifference when people only think about themselves and their families,” Bresson told Michel Ciment in an interview reprinted in James Quandt’s monograph. “But it is not an anti-bourgeois film. It is not about the bourgeoisie, but about specific people. I am a bourgeois myself. I simply happened to have observed people like that. That’s what I like about the Tolstoy story. People from other classes can behave in the same way, for the love of their children. They are not intrinsically evil, but their behavior has evil consequences.”

The story is simple. A fresh-faced youth asks his father for extra money, the father refuses. The boy is then convinced by a friend to buy an item with a counterfeit bill and pocket the change. Later, after having discovered the ruse, the shopkeeper passes the bill (along with others) to an unsuspecting workman, Yvon, who is arrested trying to spend the false money. Taken to court, Yvon pleads innocence, but the shopkeeper and his employee, Lucien, give false testimony and Yvon is humiliated at work. Quitting his job, but still having to support his family, Yvon makes a series of tragic choices that land him in jail, break-up his family, and send him on a murderous rampage.

Bresson described Yvon as being forsaken by society, and the sense of injustice that pervades the film resides in its contrast between people seemingly protected by an exclusive system and a working class laborer who lacks the social leverage necessary for justice. In jail, Yvon burns with anger as his cellmate blithely tells him, “Someone fond of you protects you from afar. A relative or a friend, say.” “I have no relatives, no friends, and no wife,” Yvon corrects him. “Never mind,” his cellmate answers, “toe the line.”

Yvon’s trajectory in prison is the opposite path taken by Fontaine in A Man Escaped despite the films’ similar use of motifs: the rattling of keys, restricted points of view, and an emphasis on penal ritual and the covert ways in which it’s subverted (a scene at mass provides the prisoners opportunity to trade contraband). While Fontaine begins the earlier film in solitary confinement and slowly establishes connections with those around him, Yvon is placed in solitary because of tensions with his fellow prisoners and guards and remains emotionally separated from them. Yet in Bresson’s paradoxical manner, one of Yvon’s greatest defeats is his lack of privacy; everyone, from prison employees to cellmates, intrude upon his personal letters and the details of his crumbling marriage. “Why are they all staring at me?” Yvon protests in the prison cafeteria, and twice in the film he hides his face while grieving, as if to escape the world around him.

Like the privileged teenagers, Lucien, the shopkeeper’s employee, provides another point of contrast to Yvon. Tasting dishonesty, Lucien becomes a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor: “I’ll be kind when I’m rich,” he tells his cohorts, and after he’s arrested, insists in court that he’s a generous person. (For a director with a reputation for humorlessness, Bresson provides the judge with a wickedly funny response: “The investigation has revealed that, along with your love of good suits.”)

But Lucien’s criminal idealism (not altogether unlike Michel’s elitism in Pickpocket) is cheap, self-serving, and continues the pattern of denial by the film’s characters, dismissing personal responsibility. Lucien prides himself on the fact that his crimes were non-violent, and reaffirms that fact when Yvon threatens his life. “We’re not killers,” Lucien says. “We alone have no one on our conscience.” “You have me on your conscience,” Yvon reminds him. (In a previous scene, Bresson has one of his minor characters voice an aphorism that is, typical for the filmmaker, part profundity and part absurdity: “A man who hasn’t killed can be worse than a mass murderer.”)

L’Argent showcases the filmmaker at the height of his formal ingenuity, particularly his use of narrative ellipses and fragmented space (close-ups of legs, hands, objects). Having already dispensed with nondiegetic music earlier in his career, the entire film provides Bresson an opportunity for artful manipulation of the soundtrack. Passing streetcars, the crackle and jingle of money, the tinny roar of mopeds, the ringing of registers, the screech of sirens and whistles, and prison echoes are all rendered in precise and vivid terms.

“In a film,” Bresson told Ciment, “sound and picture progress jointly, overtake each other, slip back, come together again, move forward jointly again. What interests me, on a screen, is counterpoint.” Bresson’s balletic tone could describe an early scene when Yvon is unexpectedly confronted by a waiter. Subdued dining sounds subtly decrescendo as Yvon stands and faces the waiter; a cut suddenly introduces Yvon’s fast moving hand as he grabs the man’s sweater and pushes him away with a swoosh; the image remains on Yvon’s hand–an appendage which has begun its social revolt–while a loud crashing sound is heard offscreen; the image then cuts to the waiter’s legs, steadying before a fallen table and broken dishes; after a pause, a car engine if heard slowing down and idling at close range and the image cuts to a police car later in the day. Bresson’s counterpoint of sound and image continually emphasizes and intensifies the action.

Although the film contains a great deal of formal beauty, it’s also an unsparing, severe work that follows its dramatic conflicts to their ultimate end. The bulk of the film’s final scenes are set in the idyllic countryside as Yvon contemplates his compulsive desire for violence. The green grass and foliage, rustic sounds of birds and flowing water, and the appearance of one of the few compassionate characters in the film are unexpected relief. Yet the uncommon peace is a “quiet before the storm” (as Bresson described it), and the virtually silent, chilling discovery of an axe in a barn initiates Yvon’s final, devastating violence.

Although many viewers have labeled L’Agent a bleak and despairing work, such a reading is often based on the film’s violent climax and abrupt ending, and tends to overlook its closing reversal, underplayed and delivered as a coda in a minor key. For Tolstoy, it initiates Part Two of The Forged Coupon, which Bresson merely hints at. Yvon returns to the city and enters a cafÈ, takes a drink, and turns himself in to nearby policemen, confessing his violence with blood on his clothes. On the surface, the scene provides little counterpoint to the horrors witnessed just moments before. Yet, significantly, it’s the first time in the film that a guilty person openly accepts responsibility for his or her actions and willingly submits to the authorities. For the moment, the violence has stopped, and in opposition to the film’s consistent depiction of an aloof and distracted bourgeoisie, all the patrons of the cafÈ gather and regard Yvon and his situation with a hushed, intense focus. The world watches. It may be the faintest glimmer of hope, but in a film predicated on deception and denial, indifference and disconnection, it’s a profoundly moving denouement that lingers.

George Lucas isn’t the only filmmaker who can turn ancient myth, graphic eye candy, doomed romance, and Buddhist non-attachment into box office gold, so can Nonzee Nimibutr. What’s more, Nimitbutr did it six years ago in Thailand with Nang Nak (recently released on DVD by Kino International), where the film became a popular sensation and helped finance festival hits like Last Life in the Universe (2003) and The Overture (2004).

For my money, Nang Nak is also a lot more fun–and even touching–than any one of the Star Wars prequels or Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003), for that matter. Not that it’s high art. Proudly wearing genre conventions on its sleeves, Nang Nak tells the haunting Thai legend of the loyal wife: a woman so loyal that she refuses to leave her husband even after she dies, thereby unnerving the town residents. Set in the mid-19th century, the lovers separate in the film’s opening scenes after an effective but utterly random montage of portentous imagery (solar eclipses, beating drums, scattering birds); the young husband, Mak, joins the war effort and leaves his pregnant wife, Nak, to tend to their picturesque hut in the Prakanong Canal.

Mak, however, soon discovers war isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and has to fight for his life while recovering from a chest wound at a monastery, and Nimibutr puts his montage talents to even greater use, juxtaposing Mak’s anguished fever dreams with Nak’s painful childbirth.

Eventually, Mak is healed by a wise old monk and invited to live at the monastery (to ease his bad fortune), but his attachment to his wife and child–whose fates are unknown to him–compels him to return home. “As you please,” the monk concedes, but then adds: “From now on, whatever may happen, remain calm.” Reunited with her husband, Nak does everything she can to please Mak and convince him to ignore the angry townsfolk who claim Nak died in childbirth and are forming a mob with torches.

But hey, summarizing the premise of this film is like listing the ingredients of mee krob noodles–what matters is its combined finesse. And Nang Nak has style to spare with its lush compositions of the flora and fauna and dramatic meteorology of its exotic setting. Clouds roll over palms, a crimson sun descends behind swaying grain, and most effective of all, raging thunderstorms–which may or may not be the machinations of devious spirits–flash their fury, casting flickering light within the shadowy confines of rickety thatched huts.

Nimibutr isn’t above a few clichÈs, however, and he depends a bit heavily on rusty standbys like rats or corpses that lurch into the frame at unexpected moments. But he saves his best tricks for the latter part of the film, offering a series of economic but innovative images; one features Nak in a tense moment, looking into a mirror that splinters, suddenly reflecting her face like a cubist nightmare.

Despite its supernatural build-up, the film maintains sensitivity toward its characters and drama, rooting its horrors in emotion and tragedy like the best of classic thrillers. The romance is presented effectively through simple and archetypical terms, and never severely falters due to clumsy elaboration or philosophical didacticism. And the film enlivens its gruesomeness with touches of humor provided by eccentric supporting characters and an appreciation for the absurd.

Nimibutr also makes conspicuous use of male nakedness; although there is no nudity below the waist, virtually every male in the film who is not a soldier or a monk wears nothing but a pair of shorts. Granted, it’s the jungle, but unless the whole town is staging a silent protest against the multinational garment industry, it seems more like an aesthetic choice than representative of current Thai fashion. Yet the many young and fit men in the film are less sexual than they are vulnerable–perhaps their shirtless lives correspond to their inability to defeat their spirit nemesis.

Nang Nak is ultimately a visually inspired, if somewhat loopy, horror-romance film that manages to preserve its thematic ambitions. Its eccentricities simply increase its pleasures and flavor a unique and pleasurable spin on the horror genre.

The new issue of Paste magazine (number 16) is currentlly on newsstands, and it features a number of articles I’ve written, including introductions to Australian cinema and Robert Bresson (highlighting New Yorker’s L’Argent and Criterion’s upcoming Au hasard Balthazar DVDs), and a short write-up on Welles’ F for Fake.

One of the films I wanted to include in my Australian article, but didn’t because I couldn’t obtain the region 4 DVD in time, was Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002), a potent and formally inventive depiction of three white, mounted police in the 1920s who chase a black Aboriginal fugitive deep into the bush. The police are guided by a forced-labor Aboriginal tracker, played by Walkabout‘s David Gulpilil, who played a similar but much less developed role in Philip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence the same year. The film’s drama rises from the tensions of the Tracker’s position; his professional efficiency versus his growing alarm at the officers’ unbridled racism, and his duty to the law versus the oppressive system it represents.

The film exhibits some of the dominant themes in Australian cinema–its respect for nature (recorded in stately compositions), sense of isolation (the four characters are alone throughout most of the film), emphasis on mateship (loyalties become crucial when tensions flare), and even its valorization of the underdog: the drama turns on the Tracker’s ability to use his lowly position to gain the upper hand.

The Tracker has been called a neo-Western, and that genre context extends further than the film’s visual motifs of desert, felt hats and horses, into its minimalist dramatic set-up and broad ethical strokes. In fact, each of the characters is named in the credits according to an archetype (The Veteran, The Fanatic, The Follower) and introduced in the film with text (a man who has been drafted, a man who rejects statistics, a man unaccustomed to expeditions). By foregrounding these elements, the film emphasizes its fable qualities and sets the stage for its moral structure, which hinges on the merging of power and racism and the possibility of resistance.

The story provides the foundation for a character study with strong ensemble performances; as The Tracker, Gulpilil is particularly memorable with his weathered face and seemingly effortless ability to transition between mysterious nobility and clownish nonchalance. In fact, Gulpilil is so good at exhibiting the former quality that he is often relegated to playing minor, Noble Aboriginal roles in lesser films; it’s nice to see him granted more room to flesh out a character here.

Like The Graduate or Magnolia, the film is also inseparable from its striking vocal score, ten songs composed by Graham Tardiff with lyrics by director De Heer, sung by Aboriginal singer Archie Roach in strong, melodic tones. The string guitar work and folksy simplicity enlivens the ideological tenor of the songs’ social protest, and the film is edited around them. One standout sequence offers a minimalist close-up of each of the main characters trudging through the bush as Roach croons about their motivations: “All men must choose the path they walk.”

Another unusual, but effective, element in the film’s design is its use of brilliantly-hued paintings by Peter Coad to represent sudden bursts of violence. The paintings are startling and descriptive, yet abstracted to a degree that helps distance the viewer from what might’ve been a more typically voyeuristic reaction to the violence. The paintings create space to process the scenes on a more conceptual level rather than a purely visceral one.

Like the aforementioned Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Tracker is one of the most recent films to confront the injustices of Australia’s 20th century colonization with admirable dramatic intensity and formal polish, contributing to the country’s ongoing investigation of its own cultural history.