Jean-Luc Godard said that Au Hasard Balthazar summed up the world.So what sums up the world?Life, death, happiness, sorrow, luck, injustice, beauty, silence, lonliness, violence, evil, abuse, awful people, good people. The thing is that I was thinking of themes from Au Hasard Balthazar and they all fit to describe the world, and how it works. And those are main elements in this film, not just something that comes up once in a while.Robert Bresson presents the story from the perspective of a donkey. Pretty much the whole film is painful to get through. Not only because of Balthazar’s treatment (I’ll get to that later), but because the evil is shown superior. Balthazar is not capable of doing a thing and the audience watches the film just as he experience the events; without being capable of doing a thing.The world just isn’t fair. Balthazar can’t do a simple thing about what happens around him and the mistreating of him cuts so deep down my heart that it pumped even harder in some scenes. We are witnesses to something horrible, and no one in the film can do a thing about it. It’s such a tragic film and the ending gave me a lump in the throat.
