Two previews: Au hasard Balthazar and Masculin Féminin

No critic in his right mind would ever presume to review films as complex as Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar or Godard’s Masculin Féminin on the basis of single viewings. Which is all I have had. Charitably assuming I am no more foolhardy than the next man, what, then, is the point of the present article? As the mumbo-jumbo mathematics of the title seeks to indicate, these are more in the nature of previews, and only secondarily-and tentatively-reviews. Not so much a conclusion, more a prolegomena.

It is neither unseemly haste nor a desire for a scoop that prompted this piece. Rather, as both these films are fairly difficult, my idea was that some readers would welcome a kind of preparation, based, as I say, on only a single viewing, but also on a close study of the scripts.

More important, however, is the fact that both these films raise the question of the relation of plot to theme, and it seems to me that this is one of the most important problems facing any film-maker today. For many directors the old one-to-one relationship is no longer either valid or viable: e.g., the classical assumption that theme is a pure expression of plot and must arise logically and dramatically from it. This particular crisis was reached years ago in the novel; it has only caught up with the cinema in the last decade.

Readers will notice that there has been little attempt to describe or evoke what either of these films looks like. This is intentional; partly because the purpose of this article is to confine itself to the above-mentioned problem, and partly because neither film differs considerably from its director’s predecessor in this respect. By and large, the Bresson looks like a Bresson film, and the Godard like — well, at least like Une Femme Mariee. Their originality is elsewhere.

To trace the genesis of a work of art is always tempting for the critic; the result, even if successful, is not always rewarding. In the case of Au hasard Balthazar, it would appear that the idea first came to Bresson on reading (or re-reading) Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; at least this is suggested by the epigraph which was to have appeared on the credits of the film: 

… though my brain worked, the logical sequence of ideas was broken. I couldn’t connect more than two or three ideas together … I was insufferably sad … I was all the while lost in wonder and uneasiness. What affected me most was that everything was strange. I was finally roused from this gloomy state one evening at Basel, and I was roused by the bray of an ass in the market place. I was immensely struck with the ass and for some reason, extraordinarily pleased with it, and suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head. “An ass? That’s odd,” observed Lizaveta Prokfyevna. “Yet there’s nothing odd about it; one of us may even fall in love with an ass,” she observed, looking wrathfully at the laughing girls. “It’s happened in mythology.” 

In any case, as long ago as autumn 1962 when Bresson came to London for the Festival presentation of Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, he told me that his next film was going to be about an ass. Controlling my astonishment, I murmured, “An ass?” Yes, the story of the ass throughout history. A lot of little episodes, the ass that carried Abraham, the one that Moses rode, the ass that bore the Virgin and Child into Egypt, the one on which Christ entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; Balaam’s ass, the ass in the manger. Ah yes, I replied, the ass as Christian symbol of patience, humility, submissiveness. Not, answered Bresson, entirely. You know, of course, that the donkey is also an important sexual symbol, the most potent of all animals.

Well, I didn’t know, and alas the conversation ended there. Now four years later the film has been made; but perhaps fortunately, Bresson’s conception of it changed a great deal in the intervening years. Au Hasard Balthazar is the story of one particular ass; it is also the story of a schoolmaster and his daughter and a gang of leather-jacketed rockers who go in for smuggling on the side: in short a story very much unlike any Bresson has ever given us.

Although it is perhaps criminal to separate what Bresson has so organically joined together, I think I shall have to recount the two stories, especially since the technique of the film is not straight narrative: it proceeds by a series of brushstrokes, short elliptical scenes which give only the barest essence of any action, leaving the viewer to fill in what happened before and after each (very short) scene, as well as obliging him to establish the various relationships himself. I see that I have mixed my metaphors already, so one more won’t matter: the film is a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms, narrative elements, and symbols.

The setting is a small French town near the Swiss border. Except for the prologue, which takes place about ten years ago, the time is the present. A schoolmaster, his wife, and their daughter, Marie, live next to a large farm, La Prairie, which is owned by a Monsieur C. from Paris. He visits the farm every summer with his children, and his son Jacques and Marie are childhood sweethearts.

During the adolescence of the children, Monsieur C. decides to confide the running of the farm to Marie’s father, the schoolmaster. By the time Marie is sixteen, her father, having been given carte blanche, has succeeded in turning the run-down estate into two hundred hectares of first-class farmland. And then the idyll ceases. Jacques, who is still in love with Marie, is rebuffed by her. She has become sexually involved with Gerard, the vicious leader of a motorbike gang. At the same time the villagers, jealous of his success, begin to foment trouble between the schoolmaster and the owner of the land, Jacques’ father. A series of anonymous letters suggest that he is embezzling the profits. The schoolmaster is (presumably) innocent, but too proud to try to vindicate himself. He wants justice, a trial.

Meanwhile, a policeman has been killed, or was it an accident? In any case he is dead, and suspicion falls on Gerard, whom the police already suspect of smuggling. But there is also another candidate: Arnold, a bearded alcoholic tramp. He denies all guilt and convinces the police chief that Gerard is innocent, too. As the police have no evidence, both are set free.

The long-awaited trial of Marie’s father takes place at last, but, revolted by the accusations and the lies, he stalks out of the court, and is condemned by default. And then a kind of miracle occurs: Arnold, poor Arnold, is left a fortune by an unknown uncle. The whole town goes wild, and Arnold throws a party in the cafe, which soon degenerates into a brawl as Gerard and his gang tear the place apart. The next morning, Arnold goes off on a long journey — and mysteriously dies on the road.

Since her parents strongly disapprove of her liaison with Gerard, Marie leaves home. Disgusted with the cruelty of Gerard and his gang, she soon takes refuge in the house of a rich and miserly merchant, offering her body in exchange for food and shelter. As the merchant sets forth his materialistic, businesslike philosophy of life, Marie becomes more and more depressed; finally rejecting the money he has offered her, she prefers to go home again. Jacques reappears, ready to forgive all, to forget all, if she will marry him. But it is too late for his kind of love, and Marie is determined to give Gerard just one more chance. She is not to be spared the ultimate indignity; ambushed by Gerard and the gang, she is beaten, stripped, and locked in a deserted house. This time she leaves, never to return. Her father, a broken man, dies.

So much for the people: now for Balthazar. He is first heard over the credits, his braying cut into the music of a Schubert Piano Sonata. In the fourth shot he appears, new born: Jacques and his sister persuade their father to let them borrow him and Jacques brings him back in triumph to La Prairie. Jacques and Marie baptise him Balthazar, and he becomes their constant summer companion. Time passes; Balthazar returns to his owner; he is shod, and learns to draw a carriage. He grows up; he ploughs, he is beaten. Finally, taking refuge at La Prairie, he is bought by Marie’s father, and he does his part in helping to cultivate the land.

Gerard and his gang torment Balthazar unmercifully, partly because Gerard suspects (?) that Marie loves the donkey more than she does him. Marie, more and more taken up with Gerard, forgets to feed Balthazar, locks herself up in her room. Her father, annoyed because the ass makes his family look old-fashioned, decides to sell him. He is bought by the baker, who has also hired Gerard to deliver bread round the countryside. Taking out all his anger and maliciousness on Balthazar, who accompanies him on his rounds, Gerard goes so far as to torture him, tying a burning paper on to his tail.

Balthazar is present when Gerard finally seduces Marie. Gerard chases her around and around Balthazar until finally she falls to the ground. (I cannot resist interjecting a comment: in this sequence Bresson’s simplicity and restraint really pay off. In exactly three shots, the whole position and destiny of Marie are made clear. 1) Marie falls into the ditch and Gerard throws himself on her; we hear the noise of an approaching car; 2) a shot of the passing automobile; 3) Gerard stands up and takes Marie by the hand. The passing car was her chance to save herself if she had wanted to, but now we know that she no longer wants to — or is able to.)

A few weeks later, Balthazar grows mysteriously ill; the baker is ready to have him put away, but suddenly Arnold appears: he will take the ass, half-dead though he may be. His gentleness succeeds in curing Balthazar, and he uses him to give rides to tourists, lovers, Sunday painters, children. But then Arnold, tormented by a nightmare, suddenly and oddly turns against Balthazar and sells him to a circus. Here I must break in with another parenthesis: Balthazar’s entrance into the circus is signalled with four extraordinary shots, one of a tiger, others of a polar bear, a gorilla, and an elephant. The exchange of glances between these four caged animals and Balthazar is fantastically exciting and profoundly moving, though why I cannot say.

In the circus he is taught to do a multiplication act (834 times 3) and he answers by stamping his foot the requisite number of times. He is a great success until the night that Arnold appears in the audience; this breaks up the show. He returns with Arnold and he is there when the police chief announces Arnold’s inheritance. And Arnold leaves town on his final journey on Balthazar’s back.

After Arnold’s death, Balthazar is sold at an auction to the miserly merchant, who uses him to turn a millstone. When Marie’s father and mother come to take her back from the merchant, he offers them Balthazar who is now too old and weak to be much use to him. After Marie’s father dies, Gerard and the others take Balthazar into the mountains on one of their smuggling expeditions. A customs officer opens fire; the boys get away, but Balthazar is wounded in the flank. The sun begins to rise on the mountain valley; the cowbells ring out, and Balthazar, wounded, makes his way down the slope. He comes to a halt and is surrounded by a flock of white sheep. They make a circle around the black standing figure, he sinks to his knees; two dogs arrive and the sheep slowly withdraw; Balthazar dies.

The two stories are intercut, intermingled even, and the most fascinating aspect of the film is the reason why Bresson has done it. The donkey is not just a device for telling the story, as in the famous French children’s book Memoires d’un Ane, by the Comtesse de Segur. Nor is it a symbol, at least not in the usually accepted meaning of the word. Instead, Bresson seems to have invented a new form of discourse, which one might call by the barbarous name of unresolving dialectics.

In Bresson’s conception, the donkey cannot be a simple one-to-one symbol, because the ass represents a plethora of significances. As Bresson indicated in our 1962 conversation, the donkey is both Christian symbol and sexual symbol. In fact, to anthropologists and psycho-analysts, the ass is “the pre-eminently phallic animal” (Ernest Jones). In ancient mythology the ass was dedicated to Priapus, and in the days of Apuleius, Robert Graves tells us, the ass typified lust, cruelty, and wickedness. Yet originally, he goes on, the ass had been so holy a beast that its ears, conventionalised as twin feathers sprouting from the end of a sceptre, became the mark of sovereignty in the hand of every Egyptian deity.

This paradox (contradiction? ambivalence? ambiguity?) is further reflected in the split between the conception of the ass as the stupidest of animals and another that he is the wisest. (Amusingly enough this contradiction persists even in the dictionaries of today: a French dictionary describes the pons asinorum as something so easy that anybody can accomplish it; a British dictionary maintains that the phrase refers to a difficult problem for beginners.)

A further problem arises in the very name of the film. Balthazar refers to one of the three wise men who journeyed to Bethlehem, of course: hence Christian symbolism. But on the other hand, Balthazar is also the French spelling of Belshazzar. I do not think this is a mere coincidence, given the fact that Daniel points out to Belshazzar that he has failed to hearken to the example of his father who, “when his heart was lifted up and his mind hardened in pride, was deposed from his kingly throne and … was driven from the sons of men … his heart was made like the beasts and his dwelling was with the wild asses; they fed him with grass … till he knew that the most high God rules in the kingdom of men, and that He appointeth over it whomsoever He will.” So, Balthazar as bringer of the Good News or Balthazar as the Lord’s instrument to chasten the wicked? The first part of the title presents a few problems, too: Au hasard can mean at random (the Wind bloweth where it listeth) or it can mean promiscuously, or blindly. These may only be apparent contradictions in the Mind of God; on the other hand, I believe Bresson means us to keep in our heads these unresolved contradictions. They force us constantly to question the events of the story; they comment on them, they judge them, they recall them into question. In other words, a perpetually unresolved dialectic. Or an open-ended, undirected, free, contradictory commentary to the story. Or have I got it all wrong? Perhaps the story of Gerard and Marie is meant as a commentary on the story of the ass?

The genesis of Godard’s Masculin Féminin should have been relatively easy to trace. As a project it began with the idea of a modern dress adaptation of two short stories of Guy de Maupassant — Paul’s Girl and The Signal. Paul’s Girl is one of Maupassant’s cruellest and most daring stories; it concerns a young man who commits suicide when he discovers, catching her in the act, that his fiancee has lesbian tendencies. The Signal is more familiar; it is the one about the woman who notices from her window on the Rue Saint Lazare a prostitute in the window opposite who, with a special twist of her head and a look, entices men up to her room. Bored and curious, our lady tries it herself, and to her horror a gentleman accepts. As her husband is due to return at any moment, the quickest way of getting rid of her importunate visitor is to go through with it.

As Masculin Féminin is a Franco-Swedish co-production, rather than mix up Swedish and French actors (as Bresson did in Au Hasard Balthazar), Godard had the idea of making ‘The Signal’ into a film within the film: the characters of ‘Paul’s Girl’ were at one point to go to the cinema where they would see a Swedish version of ‘The Signal’.

Godard has always stressed that these would be free interpretations of Maupassant, but now that the film has come out, we see that there is no trace of Maupassant at all in the film, except, perhaps, for the fact that the hero’s name is Paul and that his girl friend lives with two other girls. Although they are not meant to be lesbians, Godard suggests that you might imagine that they are very good friends. There is a trace of The Signal left in the three or four minutes that remain (!) of the film within the film, but mostly the Swedish section has become a kind of parody of The Silence (“it’s a film about a man and a woman in a foreign city”).

What, then, is Masculin Féminin about? Godard has gone on record as saying that, after Marker’s Joli Mai and Rouch’s Chronique d’un Ete, he wanted to do Paris in December, but a very particular December, that of 1965 and between the two elections. (Readers will remember that, as the first ballot for the Presidency was inconclusive, there was a second run-off between Mitterand and de Gaulle. Readers will also remember that de Gaulle finally won.) Godard adds that during the late autumn he was alone in Paris and found himself mixed up with a group of young people, who, although he is now a member of the older generation (aetat. 35), accepted him as one of them. One of the crowd was a ye-ye singer, Chantal Goya (who plays the female lead in the film); another was a young trade unionist whose sexual problems led to several deviations from the party line.

All this is doubtless true, and certainly interesting. But Masculin Féminin is much more complex than these facts would suggest. Fortunately, it is a little easier to explain than the Bresson film, though, I think, no less interesting or important. It is just that we have been prepared by Godard’s earlier films. Already from Une Femme est une Femme it became clear that Godard was not really interested in telling stories. The plot line of that film could have been — and was — summed up in two lines; the film itself was much more complex. Godard had already begun to use interspersed titles throughout the film and a kind of disembodied commentary which, even though it may have been spoken by one of the principal characters, could not be taken as simply a device to express his thoughts. Rather, it was a commentary on the film itself, on its mood and theme. Vivre sa Vie saw the idea of titles grow into a more developed principle, and in that film Godard applied his abstractionist techniques to a serious subject.

But the real breakthrough for Godard was certainly Une Femme Mariee, in which the theme was only tenuously linked to the plot itself, and in which the technique of narration was almost totally unconventional. Pierrot le Fou developed the antiphonal commentary, which, although spoken by the principal characters, sometimes preceded the action, and sometimes had little to do with it — but everything to do with what the film was really about.

Now, in Masculin Féminin, Godard has gone further still. The film is described on the credits as consisting of “fifteen precise actions” (15 faits precis), and it is indeed broken into 15 sections — I almost said tableaux, because many of them take place in a single locality and some of them are shot with an almost completely fixed camera. There is a simple story line: Paul from Marseilles has just finished his military service, and arrives in Paris looking for a job. Madeleine Zimmer, who works on a magazine but longs to be a big-time pop singer, gets him a job on her magazine. He falls in love with her, and succeeds in getting her to sleep with him. This she enjoys, but she has no desire to marry him. In spite of all their precautions, Madeleine becomes pregnant. The film ends with the death of Paul; suicide or accident? Madeleine is left investigating the possibilities of abortion.

So much for the plot. What the film is about is suggested by one of the interspersed titles: “This film could be called The Children of Marx and of Coca Cola.” Paul is a Communist; he and his friend Robert spend long hours signing petitions, putting up posters, writing U.S. GO HOME on S.H.A.P.E. cars, discussing the characteristics of the Parisian worker, damning moderate socialists. But they are living in the period of both Vietnam and James Bond, and the girls they get involved with do not share their social preoccupations. (In a sense Paul’s problem reminded me of that of Jacob in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Jacob’s search to satisfy both his intellectual and physical demands also ends in death.)

The girls are definitely self-proclaimed members of the Pepsi generation. The only preoccupation they seem to share with the boys is the birth control problem, and the discussion of the merits of the various devices forms a strong leit-motif to the film. (We must not forget that birth control is still illegal in France.) Otherwise their motto is: “Give us this day our TV and automobile, but deliver us from freedom.” The girls are not unaware of this disparity, and one of Madeleine’s friends tries to convince Paul that they are not for him; they will only make him unhappy. At bottom, he knows it too, but the means of controlling physical desire cannot be found in Das Kapital.

The relative unimportance of the story line is emphasised by the fact that its major events take place off screen: Paul’s seduction of Madeleine, and his death. This, however, does not mean that the film is without action; there is a great deal of it in spite of all the conversations. But this leads me to the most interesting thing about the film: the way in which Godard has put it together. In a completely different way from Bresson, he, too, has used the mosaic method. This being the only way, I suppose, in which he could make the film as complete as possible a picture of a certain period in time, a certain generation. For example, the first sequence (Action One) takes place in a cafe. Paul and Madeleine begin to talk, and we learn that they have a mutual friend whom Madeleine will push into helping Paul get a job on the magazine. But during this scene, an argument breaks out between a man and a woman at an adjoining table. The man and child rush out; the woman runs after them and shoots him. To point out the absence of direct connection between this incident and the main plot, Paul’s only reaction is to call out for the door to be shut. But this little scene is not gratuitous. It is there at the very beginning as a comment on what Paul’s and Madeleine’s life might be like if they were to get married.

A different kind of example can be found in the fourth section. Paul and his friend Robert are in the overhead metro, talking. Across the corridor of the train sit a blonde girl and two Black people. Their conversation is practically lifted intact from Leroi Jones’s play The Dutchman: but this is neither a homage to Jones nor a cute effect. Rather, it seems to me, it is a dramatic rendering of one of the problems that so concerns Paul and of which the girls are either ignorant or indifferent. In much the same way Vietnam makes its appearance throughout the film: first in a launderette when Robert explains to Paul who Bob Dylan is and why he is called a Vietnik; again in front of the American Hospital in Neuilly when a man sets himself on fire to protest against American policy in Vietnam. (The scene is introduced with characteristically cruel humour: a nondescript-looking man approaches Paul asking for a match. He runs off with the whole box and Paul follows after to get them back; it is then that he discovers why the man wanted the matches.)

By this defiantly unrealistic system of narrative, Godard manages to present us with all the problems facing his hero and facing boys of his generation. (The German problem is evoked by a conversation from a German tourist who cannot afford to pay a prostitute her usual fee because he is saving up to visit the Châteaux of the Loire. When she tells him her parents were killed by the Germans, he attempts to disengage himself by claiming that he was only a child at the time. But he is unsuccessful, because he cannot get out the words without stuttering: “I de-desol-desolidarise myself.”) Other problems evoked include homosexuality, wicked projectionists who show 1:66 films in cinemascope ratio, Malraux (we hear a recording of one of his speeches over a demonstration of a toy guillotine), brassieres, suicide, etc. But Godard being Godard (or perhaps me just being me) the unhappy love of Paul for Madeleine rises like a plaintive violin above the orchestral ensemble of problems, and his declarations of love are extremely moving: “Remember, you came out of the swimming pool; the same record was playing; remember, remember; December 5th, 1965 … The stars, I want to live with you, yes, tanned in a bikini, we’ll play the slot machines together … Put on your lipstick, press yourself against me, we’re taking off. Hello, control tower here. Boeing 707 calling Caravelle. Paul calling Madeleine.”