S4E44.5: Au Hasard Balthazar

**November Kelly** (0:00)
[♪THEME MUSIC PLAYING [♪THEME MUSIC PLAYING [♪THEME MUSIC PLAYING Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, I am joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorn and Devon.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:32)
Hello, listeners!

**Devon** (0:34)
Bonjour, Cowabunga, whatever is French for Cowabunga.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:37)
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.

**November Kelly** (0:47)
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.

**Devon** (0:58)
You know?

**Abigail Thorn** (0:58)
Maybe we have, maybe we have. Sterile, kinda dumb, easily led. I can see it.

**Devon** (1:04)
Buck teeth.
Yells out of nowhere a lot. Kicks things. I can see this.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:09)
Mm. Okay, alright, let's gin this up.

**Devon** (1:12)
Alright.

**November Kelly** (1:12)
I have to say, by way of contextualizing this episode, I am firmly back on my bullshit.

**Devon** (1:20)
Yay! So it would appear, my love.

**November Kelly** (1:23)
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 Arcasias. None of them really fit the bill exactly, and so what I was left with was the most tenuous link in podcasting.
A donkey is a kind of truck?

**Devon** (1:55)
A donkey is a kind of truck. I'm willing to put my stake down, defend you to the end of the earth here. A donkey is a truck. I'm convinced.

**November Kelly** (2:03)
Thank you. And on that basis, I contrived a reason for us to watch a really depressing black and white French film. It's not like me at all, I know this.
And I made us watch Robert Bresson's Au Hasard 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.

**Abigail Thorn** (2:30)
Yeah, it was nice, I liked it, it was cute. 1966, listeners were travelling back in time to the days before they invented colour.

**Devon** (2:39)
Absolutely.

**Abigail Thorn** (2:40)
Or acting, or anything, really.

**Devon** (2:43)
I'm very glad. What this represents to me, November, is that you're well again.

**November Kelly** (2:47)
Yes.

**Devon** (2:47)
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.

**November Kelly** (2:55)
Let's go.
I came back from a disco Elysium, LARP in Czechia, I got sick. Yeah, I wasn't joking about that. Yeah, because, like, that's a hundred 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.

**Abigail Thorn** (3:17)
Yeah. Last time we did this, we watched The Bicycle Thieves, which is the best movie anyone's ever made. Before that, we watched Andrei Rubalev, 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.

**November Kelly** (3:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Jean-Luc Godard called this film The World in an Hour and a Half, right? And I think that's really key. It's, you know, I talk a lot about cinema as a sort of generator of empathy.
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.

**Abigail Thorn** (3:57)
Yeah, yeah.

**Devon** (3:57)
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.

**November Kelly** (4:05)
We begin with some classical piano, some Schubert, which is abruptly, just over the credits, which is abruptly interrupted, as Abi alluded to, by horrible, braying donkey noise. I dunno how familiar we all are with donkeys, but the noise is not mellifluous to listen to.

**Devon** (4:28)
It's an affronting soundscape to start the movie with, for sure.

**November Kelly** (4:31)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, immediately we're sort of juxtaposing these things.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:34)
They don't sound good, yeah. But we see our protagonist, who is an adorable baby donkey.

**November Kelly** (4:41)
He's so sweet.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:43)
I hope nothing bad happens to the baby donkey.