Resumo de Balthazar - Anatole France

Anatole France, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924), was the son of a Paris book dealer. He received a thorough classical education at the Collège Stanislas, a boys' school in Paris, and for a while he studied at the École des Chartes. For about twenty years he held diverse positions, but he always had enough time for his own writings, especially during his period as assistant librarian at the Senate from 1876 to 1890.Balthazar" (1889), a story of the conversion of one of the Magi, and "Thaïs" (1890), about the conversion of an Alexandrian courtesan. In 1891, he published "L'Étui de nacre" ["Mother of Pearl"], the story of a hermit and a faun. It was during this period that the classicist France reacted strongly against Emile Zola's naturalism.In 1889 appeared Balthazar, a fanciful version of the story of one of the Magi, and in 1890 Thaïs, the story of the conversion of an Alexandrian courtesan during the Christian era. L'Étui de nacre (1892) [Mother of Pearl] is the story of a hermit and a faun, an ironic conjunction typical of France's art.Balthazar is a parable of sin and suffering, but barely a religious one. The Biblical echoes in it in fact seem referential (not reverential), more of a cue been taken from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In that novel (which Bresson obviously plundered for Pickpocket and L'Argent), there is a harrowing scene where a workhorse is beaten and beaten till it crumples to the ground. It is hard not to be moved by the scene, and the same applies to Bresson's film. Like Dostoyevsky, Bresson is acutely realist, and only unconventionally spiritualist.This Bresson creation, the donkey Balthazar, is one of the most intriguing and powerful in all cinema. Balthazar, whilst not the protagonist, is certainly the film's central character, and Bresson refuses to anthropomorphise him (except in a deep sense). The film's main structural idea is facile and effective - Balthazar gets passed from owner to owner, experiencing (and bearing witness to) all kinds of human love and hate. His rendering is extremely corporeal, as it would be by such a materialist director - his beautiful (at birth) and battered (at death) body, his burdened movements, his deep eyes, his perky ears, his braying. His braying. Comical and tragic, this is the film's key sound - a magnificent saxophone howl, rough as guts, from the spiritual heart, and unbearably moving

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