Why do donkeys suffer so much in film? Two recent Oscar nominees had donkeys that came to bad ends. The adorable pet donkey Jenny in The Banshees of Inisherin choked to death on a man’s severed fingers. I knew the Oscar-nominated short EO followed around a donkey that came to a bad end. Actually, I wasn’t sure about that donkey and double-checked the short’s Wikipedia entry, and yeah, that short is apparently about how poorly people treat animals and more or less guaranteed I will never watch it when the donkey in that one followed some cows into a slaughterhouse and apparently died in there because I guess the workers there couldn’t tell the difference between a cow and a donkey. And then there’s the former boys that became donkeys over in Pinocchio…
So, really, I expected bad things for the title character in the French film Au Hasard Balthazar.
This film is basically covering the life of Balthazar, a donkey who was adopted by a poor girl. However, Balthazar’s life parallels that of Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), the young girl who loves him. The pair grew up together, but Marie’s parents, poor farmers themselves, can’t hold onto the animal and he bounces around a variety of places where various owners treat him in different ways, mostly poorly. Marie, for her part, could have a happy life if she’d just marry Jacques (Walter Green), a childhood friend who legitimately loves her. Even after she becomes, according to the society and time that she lives in, a “fallen woman,” he is still more than willing to marry her. But Marie is herself basically pushed there by an implied sexual assault from local criminal gang leader Gérard (François Lafarge). Neither Marie nor Balthazar can get away completely from this guy, and he appears to lead to the deaths of both.
Or, at least, the implied death. Marie’s fate is somewhat ambiguous. After she has finally agreed to marry the more financially secure Jacques, she decides she needs to have it out with her on-again, off-again abusive boyfriend Gérard, only to be stripped, beaten, and locked in a room in a decrepit farmhouse until her father (Philippe Asselin) and Jacques come to retrieve her. Even then, Jacques isn’t scared off, but Marie’s mother tells the boy that her daughter is “gone” and Marie doesn’t appear again in the film. Balthazar’s death is more obvious as Gérard and his gang “borrow” the aged donkey for a smuggling caper across a nearby border, and when the group is caught, shots are fired, and while Gérard and his minions all manage to flee, Balthazar as a donkey clearly has no way of knowing what’s going on. He reacts after one gunshout sound, wanders off to a nearby field, lays down while a flock of sheep surround him, and he dies.
Now, I have long felt that certain animals are better at “acting” than others. Dogs, for example, have expressive faces. It’s easy to get a trained dog to look scared or fierce. Cats? Not so much. Monkeys look more human than most, and so forth. But donkeys? I never really considered them, and Balthazar doesn’t really do much in terms of emotional expression. He just walks places and does what he has to. He does shut his eyes and look happy at one point when Marie strokes him, but somehow, that animal’s death had some real emotional weight to it. He’s laying down in the field, head up, surrounded by bleating sheep and a couple barking dogs, the music swelling, and then after a quick edit, he’s lying on the ground completely, eyes closed, unmoving, and he sure looks dead. Balthazar is more a witness to humanity’s cruelty to himself and to each other, but damn if that wasn’t an emotional death all the same.
This moment comes after a long, hard life where Balthazar is used as a delivery animal, pulls a millstone for a cruel miller, and even joins the circus. A drunk uses him to give tours. And every so often, Gérard shows up to just abuse the poor animal. I think it says something that the circus might have been the kindest to him when Marie wasn’t taking care of him, and there were even incidents where she was too depressed to leave her room, to the point her parents, already poor farmers, wondered why they were taking care of a large animal that their daughter loved but can’t bring herself to care for.
Likewise, Marie moves in with Gérard, who treats her like trash, and won’t go home because she’s sure she’ll bring shame to her poor father. Jacques is kind to her, but he’s a sporadic presence, and her family’s economic and legal situations are what stands in the way of Jacques’s marrying her, to say nothing of Marie’s somewhat lackluster response to being asked. What does Marie really want out of life? It’s hard to say, but it seems to involve Balthazar.
Heck, Gérard’s abuse of Balthazar comes from jealousy that Marie seems to love the animal but not him? Although he doesn’t seem to want her love so much as her body and attention perhaps. It’s hard to say. Marie loves the donkey. Gérard beats it.
And in the end, Gérard’s carelessness and cruelty leads to the poor animal’s death.
Yeah, it never goes well for donkeys in film.
NEXT: Looks like I’m back to a Jimmy Stewart film, and this time it’s one I haven’t seen before. Be back soon for 1940’s romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner.
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