There comes a point in writer-director Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) where you realize there may no longer be any point in hoping for the best. Mostly set in the French countryside, the movie follows from infancy through untimely demise its donkey namesake, who will, over the years, be passed from owner to owner, few of whom treat him with so much as a modicum of kindness. He’ll be used as a much-whipped and -kicked means of transit for a baguette-delivery service; a circus performer dealt with slightly more nicely than his tiger, bear, and chimp colleagues; a tool of a drunkard (Jean-Claude Guilbert) who briefly uses him and another donkey to assist with hiking tours.

One of few people in Au Hasard Balthazar to genuinely love Balthazar is Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), a farmer’s daughter who meets him when he’s a baby and will continue boomeranging into his life after long periods away. The lives of Marie and this animal are complementarily precarious. Though obviously more autonomous than her donkey friend, Marie can’t help but continue returning to her abusive lover Gérard (François Lafarge), a nasty-spirited, leather-wearing hood that could be the bad-boy love interest in a Shangri-Las or Crystals song we never see regard her (or Balthazar, whom he briefly owns) with any care. 

Baptized at the beginning of the movie, Balthazar is positioned as near-saintly, testing the fundamental goodness of the mostly cruel, self-interested people with whom he crosses paths who only demonstrate the readiness with which people are willing to exploit those less powerful. (A rare moment of tenderness — Marie affectionately draping Balthazar’s soft head in a handmade, flower-laureled crown — is the movie’s most unforgettable image, in part because it acts as a brief respite to its omnipresent harshness.)

Au Hasard Balthazar is likely to induce emotional squeamishness for making its viewers endure, for an entire feature, a sweet-natured, objectively cute creature be treated badly, though one looking at the animal with compassion doesn’t feel quite let off the hook for their sympathy, either. The movie, albeit never that directly (Bresson’s famously austere, showing-it-like-it-is style is as strong as ever), might make one consider their own treatment of animals — how, even if it’s imbued with love and care, conditional it is on personal benefit. A pet’s point of view is rarely considered very seriously unless it’s acting in extremes that markedly affect its owner’s own comfort; capitalist dependency on what an outdoor animal’s body can produce in many cases can be stomached en masse as long as the violence that requires isn’t looked at directly. Not humanizing Balthazar as much as seeing him with more sensitivity than the bulk of the also-empathized-with people who oversee his life, Bresson doesn’t suggest a correct action to take or stance to have. His plain depiction of this animal’s life impels questions on its own — including the effect simulating it might have had on the donkey “actor(s)” helping move the narrative forward.

I watched most of Au Hasard Balthazar with one of my cats, an 11-year-old Russian blue who abruptly died about a week later, sleeping in my lap. I wondered, in the immediate aftermath of the movie, for another time what he’d gone through before we met (he had two owners before me, the first of whom callously declawed his front paws) and whether he was truly happy with me or just years into resigning himself to another situation — hopefully the most enjoyable and comfortable of them — over which he had no hope of wresting control. As it is in Au Hasard Balthazar, the unknowability of a largely expressionless animal’s thoughts and desires haunts.