Movie #53: Released in 1966, directed by Robert Bresson, 96 minutes. New to me!

LetterBoxd Score: 4 stars

There’s something compelling about this, even if I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped. I’ve been interested in the inner lives of animals for a long time (I was a vegetarian a decade), and hoped this movie might be about what it is to be a donkey. But Bresson’s style makes it hard for me to emphasize with the humans, and I guess also the donkeys. I’m a simple man who wants emotionally manipulative music and camera angles and acting.

So, for me, this doesn’t quite work on a “film is an empathy machine” level. But there is still a lot in here of interest. The movie is full of the inexplicable, Marie going to Gerard, her father refusing to bend on principle, Arnold getting drunk and dying on the dawn of his wealth. By that standard, Balthazar starts to make sense.

The movie works for me best as a story of Gerard and Marie. I sometimes think many of the most impactful things in life are known and familiar and become trite. Great movies can make us feel the impact anew. And so it’s trite to say it is puzzling why Marie decides to be with Gerard when he is so clearly a bad guy, and after he rapes(?) her. But that’s just how it is sometimes, and the movie makes that feel like its something that really happened.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

It’s strange; people react very differently to Bresson’s style. He famously uses amateur actors and uses them like mannequins; apparently some find conventional acting distracting and so they get sucked into Bresson’s worlds more fully. But isn’t how I respond. For me it creates a distance.

Next: The Battle of Algiers