Au Hasard Balthazar
Acceptable with guidance. Age: 18+. A Catholic review of this movie for parents.
Our review
Balthazar is a gentle donkey who is passed from one owner to another. Some people are kind to him, but many are cruel. He carries it all quietly, like a little picture of innocent suffering. This sad French movie is for grown-ups. Bresson shows human sin plainly: cruelty, greed, pride, lust, drunkenness. Against it he sets one patient animal who harms no one. Greydanus calls Balthazar an icon of innocent suffering and the ending quietly sublime. Parents should know that a young woman, Marie, is sexually assaulted by a young man, and later she is stripped and beaten by his gang. Greydanus calls the handling very restrained, and the film treats these acts as evil. The cruelty to the donkey is painful too. It is hard, slow and subtitled. It rewards an adult who brings faith to it.
For parents
Not rated. No Catholic classification was retrieved. Greydanus says Teens & Up. Lumen says adults, because of what happens to Marie, the cruelty to an animal, and how little comfort the film offers, and no classification was found to anchor a lower age. Know this before you watch: a young man, Gerard, forces himself on Marie in her car (Wikipedia says the assault is implied, not shown). Later his gang strip her, beat her and lock her in a barn, and her mother says she is gone and will never come back. Greydanus calls the film's handling very restrained, but how much is seen on screen was not confirmed in a fetched source. The donkey is beaten and at the end is shot and dies. An older teen could watch only with a parent who has seen it first. Things to frame: the donkey is not Christ, and the film is not an allegory with a key. He is an image of the innocent who suffer at the hands of sinners. Recall the donkey of Palm Sunday and the ox and ass of the crib. Ask: which of the seven deadly sins do you see in each owner? Why does Marie go back to the boy who harms her? Is anyone in the village kind without wanting something? Where, if anywhere, does grace appear? Read Isaiah 53:7 afterward.