Kill James Bond! - S4E44.5: Au Hasard Balthazar

Starting point is 00:00:01 Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friend Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello, listeners. Bonjour, Kawabunga, whatever is French for Kawabunga. We're here, we're stroking our long, fuzzy ears. We've all been transformed into bottom. In Nova's case, it wasn't much of a transformation.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Unseen. We've been fighting the puppy girl, Cat Girl Wars for a hundred years. And I think we've been sleeping here on the prospects of donkey girl, you know? Donkey Girl. Maybe we have. Maybe we have. Stereil, kind of dumb, easily led.

Starting point is 00:01:04 I can see it. Buck teeth, yells out of nowhere a lot, kicks things. I can see this. Okay, all right. Let's gin this up. All right. I have to say by way of contextualizing this episode, I am firmly back on my bullshit.

Starting point is 00:01:18 So it would appear, my love. I was trying to play along. I was trying to find a good truck film and I went through a couple. I went through like a Japanese romantic comedy called Vibrator. I went through a Serbian film called my Red Blue Truck or something. I went through like a South American one called Las Arcations. None of them really fit the bill exactly.

Starting point is 00:01:47 And so what I was left with was the most tenuous link in podcasting. A donkey is a kind of truck. A donkey is a kind of truck. I'm willing to put my stake down and defend you to the end of the earth here. A donkey is a truck. I'm convinced. Thank you. And on that basis, I contrived a reason for us to watch a really depressing

Starting point is 00:02:10 black and white French film. It's not like me at all. I know this. And I made us watch Robert Brissons or Azar Balthazar or Balthazar at random, if you'd rather. Now, I hope you enjoyed it because this is, like I say, it's a sort of, it's a real November pick, you know. Yeah, it was nice. I liked it. It was cute. 1966 business were traveling back in time to the days before they invented color. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:02:40 Or acting or anything, really. I'm very glad. What this represents to me, November, is that you're well again. Yes. You've been ill for a second. You're back, baby. I'm so back. Sat up like The Undertaker, put on the French film about a donkey.

Starting point is 00:02:55 Let's go. I came back from a disco-aliseum larp in Czech here. I got sick because, yeah, because that's 100 people in close quarters. And then, you know, I took a while of sounding like Con O'Neill for a bit. But eventually I rallied, and I rallied with the power of existential French filmmaking. Yeah. Last time we did this, we watched The Bicycle Thieves, which is the best movie anyone's ever made.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Before that, we watched Andre Rubilev, which is the Adventures of Logan Paul, a medieval Russian monk. And now we're doing the adventures of a fucking donkey in the French countryside. Let's go. Lock in. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Jean Maguire called this film The World in an Hour and a Half, right? And I think that's really key. I talk a lot about cinema as a sort of generator of empathy.

Starting point is 00:03:47 This is an attempt to sort of push that to its limits. And the reason why is because it is entirely POV donkey. Well, not POV, but you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah. It's not POV, but it's, as you say, it's Balthazar at random. It's just moments from the life of a donkey. Mm-hmm. We begin with some classical piano, some Schubert,

Starting point is 00:04:08 which is abruptly, just over the credits, which is abruptly interrupted, as Abby alluded to, by horrible braying donkey noise. I don't know how familiar we all are with donkeys, but the noise is not mellifluous to listen to. It's an affronting soundscape to start the movie with, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Immediately we're sort of juxtaposing these things.

Starting point is 00:04:34 They don't sound good, yeah. But we see our protagonist who is an adorable baby donkey. He's so sweet. I hope nothing bad happens to the baby donkey. The literal first shot is of a human hand reaching out to pet this baby donkey and stroking him. And these are children, right, who are sort of like passing him. And they take him away from his mother, this donkey. immediately to be like, no, we want this donkey, we want this one.

Starting point is 00:05:10 Yeah. I wanted this one donkey, as my dad said when he was a child, and this has become a famous saying in the family for, like, being stubborn. I wanted this one donkey. But they do. They wanted this one donkey, and they get him. They want this one donkey. Yeah, they go, like, we got to have this one,

Starting point is 00:05:25 and their father who's there goes, it's impossible, and we immediately cut to the three of them walking away with the donkey. Perfect. Yeah. No. There we. Wow. All right.

Starting point is 00:05:34 It reminds me of the poem about having Andrew Kane, how to be a dog. To be a dog, you must learn to give up your children and not know why. Sort of immediately teaches you how to watch the movie as well, because like, you're led to be straight away. Things are going to be happening between shots. A lot of this is going to take place in between things and you're just going to have to figure it out. Absolutely. It's like you're not inviting the donkey into the room for like a lot of the really important conversations. And he's not paying attention to it.

Starting point is 00:06:04 Really? No. Yeah, he's got shit to do. He's got donkey shit to do, you know? We don't know how, whether there was a negotiation with a farmer or what, but whatever, they said you can't have the donkey, and then the next thing they have the donkey, the donkey's like, okay, I guess I'm going with these guys. Yeah, and the first thing that the donkey has to do on the donkey to do list is get baptized.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Get baptized. Get baptized. Get baptized, get named by these children in a sort of like, mimicry of like Christian baptism, Right, because I'm like sort of faux holy water like sprinkled on him. And a little girl names him Balthazar after one of the three wise men. Yeah. If you don't go to donkey baptized, you go to donkey hell. Well, so this is interesting.

Starting point is 00:06:46 This is a view that I read in a review of this, as I was researching for this, is the idea that by baptizing him and naming him, these children have like accidentally insouled him. And that's why there's a movie, you know? I don't really buy at all, but I think is a kind of charming idea. It's cute, yeah. I like it's teaching us like, you gotta have empathy with the donkey. Like, how do you tell the view as the donkey has a soul? Baptise the donkey. Great.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They cuddle him and they play with him. He's so sweet and pleasant. Yeah, one of them feeds him salt and says sort of like, you know, sacerdotally receive the salt of wisdom. So again, it's like, you're sort of, you're sort of, you're sort of, you're sort of, you're sort of of creating this idea of what this donkey should be, right?

Starting point is 00:07:34 This insults donkey. I'm locked in already. I'm Titania Maxing. I love the donkey. These two kids, by the way, Marie and Jacques. Marie is the daughter of the father that they were having. Jacques is sort of like a child who lives nearby that they're friends with. This will not be explained to you at any point because they don't say that to the donkey.

Starting point is 00:07:53 So you're going to figure it out. But key to understand listeners is that Jacques's father owns all the farm land around this area, and Marie's father is a schoolmaster who lives next door. He lives on the land, but he does not own it. Yeah, Jacques and Maria are like childhood sweethearts, and Jacques's family are like, you know, metropolitan. They're maybe away from Paris for the summer. And, you know, Marie's father is this teacher turned sort of tenant farmer, as you say. We don't get a lot of exposition here, which I really like. Like, for instance, the other little girl, the one gives Balthazar the donkey, the salt is, we don't know, because we're not going to spend

Starting point is 00:08:35 a lot of time explaining that. But what we do get is a nice... They're like playing to the donkey. Yeah, a nice little montage of these kids like playing in the fields with this donkey, frolicing, and then... Oh, wonderful. What a cute donkey. I hope he's not in for a lifetime of toil and hardship.

Starting point is 00:08:53 Ooh, oh, bad news. Fuck, yeah. Yeah, it's unfortunately donkey hitting day. Yeah, yeah. Well, not yet. Because one of Jacques's little sisters dies. And so Jacques's family is so grief-stricken that they take him away. As we will later learn, Jacques's father just like says to Marie's father,

Starting point is 00:09:13 do whatever you want with the land. You know, you farm it, do whatever you want. I don't care. I'm too griff-stricken to me to give a shit. But we're leaving. You're my boy. I trust you. Yeah, Jacques is like, I'm going to leave and I'm going to grow up and, you know, come back later in the movie.

Starting point is 00:09:25 See you later, Balthazar. And Balthazar is like, cool, okay. I bet my life's going to be great. Yeah. What am I... What's next on the menu for the donkey? It is unfortunately donkey hitting day. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:37 Donkey hitting day is every day. We've got donkey hitting day later. Oh man. See it out on my calendar. Also, all of these things, all of these scenes are depicted very naturalistically, right? There's not a lot of acting, there's not a lot of artifice in this, and I'll talk a bit more about that later. But you go from this picture of sort of like, you know, childhood sweetheart separated and that sort of like, you know, regret that you don't really know how to express at that age to vision of human cruelty to guys who just want to get the fucking donkey to carry the shit and are exhausted hitting the donkey. It's sadistic.

Starting point is 00:10:20 What we function get at this point is a donkey Conan the Barbarian montage has like years goodbye. And Bathazar was like toiling and like getting huge and it's just becoming like jacked like donkey Schwarzenegger like pulling a big wheel and shit. I wrote donkey commanding. They made this motherfucker get a job. They made him have to work. And as he's working, you see the title appear on the screen.

Starting point is 00:10:48 Les Anet Pass, right? Like the years pass. And you'd hate for Les Ané to pass. That's terrible when that happens. I was fine with Lazzane passing while I was having a good time with the kids. But during the donkey hitting session, I don't want that to last years. No, I don't want those annes to pass.

Starting point is 00:11:04 We get a kind of horrifying sequence where he's forced to like pull an overladen hay cart, right? And it's very, it uses sound very violently in this film. Everything sort of like affronts in the same way as the brain donkey interrupting the shoe butt, right? Where it's like hooves clattering on, like, cobble-s, like, cobble-stretched, and the wheels of the cart, which are very, very loud and moving too fast because he is being driven too fast. Yeah. Well, he's going downhill.

Starting point is 00:11:37 He loses control of it on the downhill. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he crashes and gets separated from the cart. And then the farmers, the lads are really angry with him and they chase him away. And he runs. Yeah, they do. And he runs into the grounds of the old farm where he grew up that's now kind of like overgrown, runs back to his old stable.

Starting point is 00:11:56 He tries to go back to the river. Oh, no, you can't. It's all fucked. Very animal instinct. I will say, when he does crash the cart, the shot of the ballastazar donkey in amongst the hay, really sweet. Yeah. Really beautiful.

Starting point is 00:12:09 Yeah. It's funny. I love this donkey. It's quite tender. There's kind of like gentleness about the vows of donkey. Yeah. But Marie is here. He runs back home and he finds Marie, who is now grown, who pets him.

Starting point is 00:12:24 And we learn that her dad has taken over this 500 acres and he's plowed. all with a tractor and he's put his time and effort into it and he's turned it into a big productive farm. Good for him. Yeah, this tractor. With the modern techniques we can do, we can farm so much better now. This tractor is another example of leaning really heavily on the sound. It's a really like, the engine noise is really high in the mix. It's really like harsh and abrupt, right? But we see as he's, as he's talking about how he's farming these fields, Marie kind of questions this a little bit. She, you know, has a sort of more philosophical attitude. And she does say to him, you know, these fields aren't ours, right?

Starting point is 00:13:05 Like, nothing's ours. And she doesn't just mean that in the sense of him being a tenant farmer, but in a sort of more state of nature way. Yeah. And whilst they're out in about one day, they're being towed by Balthasar in a little cart, some local kids come by on the bikes, and they're like, oh, nice fucking donkey, how many horsepower does it get 0.5? Fuck you. Like, get with the times, old man. Yeah, they've got motorbikes, and it's like

Starting point is 00:13:33 day one first ever motorbike invented. It's so good. It's just like a motorbike with a loud-ass fucking lawnmower engine on the front. And they're like, wow, donkey, that's modern. They've got the leather jackets, like the wire, like the wild bunch. They've got leather jackets. They've got cigarettes. Fucking Donald Snakes rule! Dude, there's a shot later on where he's got

Starting point is 00:13:52 like cigarettes. He's got a radio and a leather jacket and a motorbike, and you're like, you know what, you would kind of feel like you were king of shit if you were the first fucker ever in your rural French village to be able to live like this. And this is, this is Gerard. Gerard. We see that this, this stings a bit. Like, this, this mockery kind of stings both Marie and her father a little bit, this idea that having a donkey is kind of like old fashioned, you know?

Starting point is 00:14:18 But it's like embarrassing. Yeah. But as you say, Abby, this is, this is Gerard and his gang. Gerard, one of the worst pieces of shit ever filmed. Kill Gerard 2K-26, Kill James Bond. Great casting. He looks like Toby Maguire in the black suit Spider-Man outfit. He's kind of got that slightly, like, oily, greasy, like, da-da-da-da-da-da-dun.

Starting point is 00:14:41 Kind of like, I was hit to him. He's got the fucking Venom symbiote. Fuck this kid! He sucks, he sucks. Speaking of oily, he and the gang are introduced pouring motor oil on the ground. seemingly you think this is just like something they did in olden times like how on the fucking driving theory test it tells you like hey don't pour your motor oil just on the ground for no reason because we stopped doing that when woke came in um but no it turns out that the

Starting point is 00:15:08 reason why they're doing this is just a crash random cars yeah these fucking terrors

Kill James Bond! - S4E44.5: Au Hasard Balthazar

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