Word: balthazar
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...Donleavy writes sad and lonely books. From The Ginger Man to The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, his fictional worlds seem to spin through an otherwise lifeless universe. They are closed worlds, their boundaries no more distant than the most prominent erectile tissue. Alone, without context or meaning, the flesh...
Bresson is trying to approach an unsentimentalized naturalism, and by making Balthazar the surface dramatic center, he frees himself from artificially forcing the lives of his human characters into neat dramatic confrontations. He wants to present life not as artistically ordered but life as stumbled upon-in all its formlessness. This would make for tedious watching if not for the figure of Balthazar who becomes a principle of coherence, a kind of unspeaking narrator...
BRESSON wants the involvement of emotionalism without its stickiness, and again it is Balthazar that provides the necessary detachment. One by one the human figures fade from the film and Balthazar gradually assumes their sympathetic features...
Bresson's technique in this regard owes much to literary symbolism. Balthazar is a vessel for emotional associations that multiply as the film proceeds. He is a symbol of the promises of Jacques and the physical love of Gerard. He is a sexual substitute. He is the personification of stoicism. He is variously called a saint, a genius and an anachronism. By the end of the film, he is an embodiment of the whole complex of dramatic relationships...
...consummate moment, in an almost perfectly controlled film, is the last sequence, the death of Balthazar. While being used to smuggle goods out of the town, he is deserted and accidentally shot. Slowly bleeding to death, he walks to the middle of a field, lays down and silently dies among a flock of bleating sheep. The immediate impression is of the nobility of the death. But Bresson holds his shot on the heaped mass of dead flesh. And all the humanizing emotions one is tempted to attribute to Balthazar, all the pity one wants to feel...