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All this makes Bresson sound cold and inhuman, unapproachable and difficult. That's certainly his reputation: just try and find an article about his work that doesn't use the word "austere." But surprisingly, viewers who can set aside their usual expectations often find these pictures extremely powerful—far more accessible than, say, Bergman or Tarkovsky. Even on first viewing, I found A Man Escaped the most stomach-knotting prison-break film I'd ever seen, its painful tension due to a million factors, not least of which was the film's utter realism: the director's claustrophobic concentration on the physical realities of the prison, the stone and iron and silence, convinced me not only that this was a true story but even that it was actually happening.  Diary of a Country Priest aroused such immense compassion in me for its odd and introverted fledgling priest, ostracized by his parish and crushed by physical and spiritual agonies, that I felt I was witnessing an anonymous martyrdom as heroic as the early Christians or more famous saints.

But it's "the donkey movie" that haunts me most, though I can hardly say why. Perhaps this is part of its power: there is something about Au Hasard Balthazar you can't quite get hold of. It arouses deep feeling and an undeniable sense of Mystery, but when you try to describe it (or even more wrong-headedly, to explain it), the words seem to miss the point.

Arnold, the town drunk, played by Jean-Claude Guilbert

Bresson devotees will cringe at this, but the film shares part of its appeal with the Disney nature films of the same era—the privilege we feel watching animals doing animal things. There's a childlikeness in creatures, uncovering a childlikeness in us when we spend time with them: some essential empathy comes into play, and we recover something that eludes us as adults—we become more deeply human. C. S. Lewis was right when he said that much of our nature—and, indeed, a profoundly good part of our nature—is shared with the beasts. We may be animals with spirits, but we're animals nevertheless.

Still, in most ways, this couldn't be more different than a Disney flick. Disney gives us the winsome antics of cute critters, complete with warm-voiced narration to explain their behavior, making their animal subjects almost human. But Balthazar is above all a donkey: there's no Shrekking or Eeyoring here. Instead of bringing the animal closer to us, letting us imagine that he's more human than we would have thought, Bresson takes us closer to the animal, and we realize how "not human" he is—and how inhuman our world looks through his eyes. Bresson immerses us in life as a donkey experiences it, and instead of identifying with the creature because he's almost human, we identify with him because we're almost animals. (Back to Lewis: Isn't there something profoundly Christian about being reminded that we are, after all, common and lowly creatures ourselves? Fashioned by a Creator?)

But this is not just the story of a donkey. The gentle-eyed Balthazar is always there, and the fact that we can't quite get hold of the human stories around him—they're told in such a fractured, fragmented way—keeps him at the film's emotional centre. Still, those human characters are intriguing, especially Marie (Anne Wiazemsky, who resembles Scarlet Johansson), a luminously beautiful, achingly vulnerable girl whose spirited resistance to her oppressive circumstances coexists with a self-destructive attraction to men who use and mistreat her. She gives herself to Gerard (François Lafarge), a petty small-town punk who's the runt of the litter of black-leather-jacketed angry young men, a down-market James Dean or Brando. Gerard and his cronies light firecrackers in the street outside a party that will soon turn violent, and Marie's mother voices our bafflement: "What do you see in that boy?" Marie's answer explains nothing, but tells everything: "I love him. Do we know why we love someone? If he says 'come,' I come. 'Do this,' and I do it. I'd follow him anywhere. If he asked me to, I'd kill myself for him." A firecracker explodes, we see Balthazar flinch, and a whole constellation of dreadful, fateful connections is made between girl and donkey.

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