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Following Buñuel's jackass at the window (Los Olvidados), the sublime braying aria that punctuates a Schubert sonata. Baptism to Calvary, the equine soul of rural France. Dissolve to yoke and lash after the idyll of childhood, the upturned cart occasions the return home, the farm run by the intransigent schoolteacher (Philippe Asselin). The first of the human dramas the donkey plays silent witness to, also the first cardinal sin embodied along the way ("He loves his misery more than us"). The maiden (Anne Wiazemsky) is courted by the earnest heir (Walter Green), no match for the leather-jacketed lout (François Lafarge). Barely escaping the euthanizing sledgehammer, the animal is taken in by the drunken vagrant (Jean-Claude Guilbert) and flees to the circus, where it mimics (or mocks?) rationality before blackboard equations. "Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest mind of our century!" Bless the beasts of burden, the Robert Bresson grace upon them in a starkly flowing, mysteriously immense requiem. Hooves on mud, howling wind and yé-yé tunes, a concrete world for grounding allegories. The ultimate pure gaze, one black eyeball meeting another at the caged menagerie, tiger and chimp and elephant in stunning succession. "Plaisirs et peines," the vagabond suddenly flush from an inheritance bids adieu to a roadside power line and falls off his ride to crack his head on the ground. The baleful miser (Pierre Klossowski) materializes amid the smashed bottles of a teenage bash, the world is a marketplace to him, he receives the runaway out of the rain and into a blanket. (She negotiates her body for the night while eating spoonfuls of jam and swatting at his hand.) A flock of sheep near the frontier marks the final spot, the camera tilts down from a hill to find the mortally wounded Balthazar surrounded by whiteness, cf. McCabe & Mrs. Miller. "Don't mock my tears." Mouchette is its twin in suffering and beauty. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. With Nathalie Joyaut, Marie-Claire Frémont, and Jean-Joël Barbier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |