This film belongs right up there with Citizen Kane and it's impossible to rate any film higher than that. Both should be mandatory viewing in every film school in the world where they would serve, with luck, to deter the average and inspire the gifted. Between them they represent everything that is good about the art and/or craft of making films. Citizen Kane chose to say a very simple thing - money can't buy happiness - in an extremely clever and sophisticated way; Au Hasard Balthazar chooses to say something open to a hundred interpretations in just about the simplest way possible. Au Hasard Balthazar is at once as simple as a glass of water and as complex as a snowflake. Above EVERYTHING it is both Beautiful and Heartbreaking and long after scholars, academicians, theologists and their Uncle Max have exhausted the debate from every permutation of metaphysical, metaphorical and allegorical mathematically possible its simplicity and beauty will remain etched in the memory. Not even Vincent Cassell at his worst inspires more hate and contempt than Francois Lefarge who swaggers through the film like a dysfunctional rooster, taunting, beating, setting fire to Balthazar's tail as the fancy strikes him and not even Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi (who can do no wrong in these eyes) has done simplicity and decency better than Anne Wiazemsky, the only person in the entire film who feels any love for or shows any love to Balthazar. Like many people who love film I sometimes despair as the sea of Robocops, American Pies, Matrixes and worse threaten to grow to tsunami proportions and engulf us all in a tidal wave of mediocre merde and all I can say is that next time YOU feel like that slip Au Hasard Balthazar into the DVD and renew your faith in all that's best about film-making.
Review of Au hasard Balthazar
