The kind folks at UW Cinematheque followed up their screening of EO with one of Au Hasard Balthazar, the 1966 Robert Bresson movie that provided the basis of the former film.
Here we get less donkey and more human drama. It opens with a boy named Jacques who baptizes our equine hero along with his sisters and the girl he has a crush on, Marie. One of Jacques' sister dies and he and his family move away from the town and Balthazar ends up being sent to a farm. Years later he returns to Marie who is now a willful teenager in "love" with the town bad boy, Gérard, while the donkey is passed from owner to owner.
If, as the presenter noted in his intro to Au Hasard Balthazar, Eo goes on an odyssey, then Balthazar is more of a Greek chorus. He appears less frequently than Eo, popping up to offer some contrast to and commentary on the hairless apes and their small town drama. Eo, on the other hand, is centerstage and it his journey that acts as an omnipresent glass mirror for the audience to see through, however darkly.
My own preference is for EO. I can appreciate Bresson originating the conceit and will admit that my heartstrings got tugged at the end as
SPOILERS!
we watched life slowly ebb from Balthazar.
But I found the small town drama to be largely inconsequential, with what I think of as the more trivial concerns of teenagers being given more weight than they deserve.
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