Showered with awards and long since regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema this is one of Robert Bresson's most lyrical and accessible films and one in which, in his own words: "I put the best of myself."
The different stages in the life of the donkey Balthasar are here analogous to the life of a human being and the beast becomes a witness to and victim of mankind's frailty and destructive impulses. Although the film avoids sentimentality, the final scene is almost unbearably moving, heightened by the inspired use of the Andante from Schubert's sonata in A with its sparse, lamenting, poignant melody.
Bresson and his preferred editor Raymond Lamy ensure the film never drags whilst the casting of Anne Wiazemsky with her innate spirituality, is spot on. She was shortly to marry Jean Luc-Godard who perfectly summed up Bresson's piece as "really the world in an hour and a half."
The different stages in the life of the donkey Balthasar are here analogous to the life of a human being and the beast becomes a witness to and victim of mankind's frailty and destructive impulses. Although the film avoids sentimentality, the final scene is almost unbearably moving, heightened by the inspired use of the Andante from Schubert's sonata in A with its sparse, lamenting, poignant melody.
Bresson and his preferred editor Raymond Lamy ensure the film never drags whilst the casting of Anne Wiazemsky with her innate spirituality, is spot on. She was shortly to marry Jean Luc-Godard who perfectly summed up Bresson's piece as "really the world in an hour and a half."