If life has no meaning, then do not continue to the next sentence.
Thank you.
For those of you still reading.
You must excuse my reliance on 1/3rd of the trivium (to the detriment of the remainder).
It must be rhetoric which I employ.
Like a donkey.
No.
It doesn’t work that way.
But for those of us in poverty and misery.
How do we express our futile existences?
By affirming their meanings.
Their meaningfulness.
You have not worked your whole life for nothing.
You worked to survive.
But you survived for others.
You loved. You cared.
You were curious.
Too curious to let the human race go.
And so, slow and easy does it goes [sic]…the autumn of your years.
Perhaps.
Another spring.
Hope. Eternal.
Robert Bresson slips a note under our door.
A key.
At first viewing it is dull. Ugly.
Like a donkey.
Yes.
But Bresson knew Beethoven. Concision of expression.
Economy of means.
It is no wonder that we hear Schubert throughout this film.
And no wonder that Schubert is Philip Glass’ favorite composer.
Those ostinati. Figured bass.
Even simpler than Alberti.
More like a rail fence transposition.
Or a Caesar shift cipher.
Ostinato. Obstinate.
Like the donkey.
But I have patiently borne the humiliation.
I am still a youthful beast of burden.
And yet I know my hooves.
I am a genius.
A four-legged mathematician.
Give me three digits…and a single digit.
And I multiply.
I fecundate the field with feathery flowers.
Four digits.
Do I hear five?
With a memory like an elephant.
A stare like a tiger.
And a harangue like a polar bear.
But look how he shivers.
The donkey.
So humble as to not say a word.
Perhaps it was the wisdom of salt.
Salt of the earth.
A wise ass.
Yes, forever in trouble. With my pride.
Getting kicked in the rump.
But these are really nasty assaults.
The other side of James Dean.
François Lafarge as Gérard is a real asshole.
Not enough love at home.
Feels a need to punch donkeys.
[pause]
Quite literally…the world comes to life through Bresson’s filmmaking.
Prostitutes pop up.
Pimps prance and preen.
But here we have “merely” sexual assault.
A first step in losing the ability to feel anything.
Numb.
And we have rape (through allusion, of course).
Gérard toots his horn.
Literally.
The other side of the James Dean coin.
The underside of Jean-Paul Belmondo.
A disproportionate riposte courtesy of the one filmmaker with the balls to be simple.
So simple.
On first glance it is nothing.
A donkey.
But live a few years.
And then revisit.
It is a novel.
It contains everything.
We can’t catch it because it doesn’t pop out at us in color.
One way would be to say that no one has ever looked more sad on screen than Anne Wiazemsky here.
Before Godard.
Perhaps a first conversation.
A nervousness.
It was through Wiazemsky that Bresson told this tale.
To teach the New Wave.
They hadn’t learned all the lessons yet.
He wasn’t done speaking.
The quiet tone of an old man…
I want to tell you more more more.
But this is best secret.
To appreciate the simple things.
Before they are gone.
The patient animals.
So gentle in their existence.
Not presuming.
Not running. Not hustling.
The pack-animals.
We know this look.
In cats. In dogs.
This wisdom.
We laugh at their carefree insolence.
But they have shown the way.
Such resilience!
Such love…
And we are taken in.
Our hearts are melted.
Yes.
Few moments in cinema feel more lonely than the end of Au Hasard Balthazar.
It is almost unbearable.
The quiet dignity of humanity being shamed.
How could we ever forget our love.
For even a second.
When we rub two sticks together at such an eyelevel perspective, the meaning of life is very clear.
But unutterable.
-PD
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