Hoo boy. So this is a movie about a donkey named Balthazar. The movie opens with him as a wee babby donkey being purchased by a girl and her family; they proceed to baptize it and play with it, and it’s all looking like a sweet little pastoral, maybe almost a kid’s movie?

HAHAHAHA. No.

What follows is:

Spoilers

  1. The donkey gets passed from owner to owner, almost all of whom beat it. (One, the leader of the gang of local thugs, sets fire to its tail.) Weirdly, it spends a bit of time in a circus solving multiplication problems. Anyway, it ends up gunshot and dead in a field.

  2. The girl grows up and falls in (not entirely willingly) with the tail-fire thug-leader boy, who proceeds to abuse her for years, leaving her in a state of self-loathing suicidal despair. (The movie is ambiguous about whether she ends up killing herself or merely running away in the end.)

  3. The father of the family ends up stubbornly arguing with his landlord for no friggin’ reason whatsoever other than misplaced pride, which ends up bankrupting and ruining him; he dies a broken old man.

The movie is supposed to be suffused with religious symbolism — the seven episodes in the film represent the seven sins allegedly, and all sorts of other things are supposed to represent other religious things (the girl is named “Marie” omg just like the mother of Jesus), and we’re supposed to come to think of the donkey as saint-like in its suffering and blah blah blah.

But the thing about symbolism is, it only works if the thing works in its own right, which this zero percent does for me. But who knows, maybe you would enjoy watching a cavalcade of religiously symbolic misery for ninety minutes; the evidence suggests that film critics do.