Balthazar at Random

La nouvelle vague is the French term for the "New Wave", and it's not unfair to mention the French term since they more or less invented the New Wave by rejecting the Hollywood style of moviemaking. Sometimes, however, I think with my high school French that La nouvelle vague could just as easily translate to "The New Vague". It's a thought that I couldn't help but have as I was watching Au hasard Balthazar.

In a village somewhere in the French Pyrenees, two families live near each other, and have children who are about the same age, Jacques and Marie. Marie's father is the head of what looks like a village one-room schoolhouse, while Jacque's family runs a farm. They get a donkey, and Marie and Jacques decide to have a Catholic baptism for it, naming the donkey Balthazar. In fact, the relationship between Marie and Jacques is deeper than that because, despite their young age, they act like the sort of kids who are expecting to be the boy and girl next door and get married when they grow up.

However, Jacques has a sickly sister who eventually dies, forcing Jacques' parents to sell off everything on the farm, including Balthazar, while kinda-sorta renting out the farmland to Marie's family, even though her father is a teacher and not a farmer. Years pass -- literally, as a caption informs us -- and Marie grows int a teenager who is deeply unhappy with her life because she doesn't really have much of a life. But at least she gets Balthazar back.

At least for a while; the movie is as much about the trials that poor Balthazar goes through as it is about Marie's trials. Her father gets in a legal dispute over the property, leading to what her father thinks is a loss of honor and his deciding to put himself through all sorts of abasements to repay his debts to Jacques' father and to society in general. And then Marie has to suffer a tempestuous relationship with young Gérard. He leads a band of 20-somethings who make a living in part by smuggling stuff across the border into Spain. He seems to be in love with Marie, but her mother realizes he's no good for her and bans him from being alone with Marie. Gérard is caught up in a murder investigation where a local drunk might have been the murderer, or maybe not.

As all of this is going on, Marie's tough life is paralleled with Balthazar's tough life. At one point he's close to death, although that drunk in Gérard's investigation takes custody of the donkey which turns out to be a godsend for the donkey. Jacques eventually comes back to see Marie and to resolve the legal case between the two fathers, but Marie isn't certain she loves Jacques or if it's just friendship.

Au hasard Balthazar is one of those movies that all the critics go gaga over, having declared it one of the greatest films of all times. As I was watching it, I thought about that and about another film in that regard, Raging Bull. Both of them are movies made well enough, and I didn't particularly dislike either of them. But at the same time, I couldn't quite figure out why critics would rate Au hasard Balthazar as an all-time classic. The cinematography is quite good, and the movie effectively gets across its point about the struggle of life. But the critical gushing frankly escapes me.