AU HASARD Balthazar (writer-director Robert Bresson) is an attack on sentimentality that manages to avoid all the depressing, self-affirming, grimy little pessimism that flaunts itself in the name of honest cinema. The conception here is far more complex: something of benign hopelessness with a comic sense. Bresson has something unpleasant to say, but he says it pleasantly. He sets his film in the countryside and makes of the story an inverted pastoral.

Jacques is the son of a wealthy landowner. Maric is the daughter of one of his tenant farmers. They meet as children, play with the donkey Balthazer, carve their names on a bench and promise to be forever faithful.

At this point the film threatens to trail off into rich boy-poor girl romance. But suddenly Jacques fades from interest; the story jumps forward five or six years; and the direction of the narrative changes completely. Marie is no longer the poor (but honest) farm girl, virgin down to the calluses on her bare feet. Now, openly contemptuous of her father's self-inflicted integrity, she has taken to sneaking off to the woodshed with Gerard, leader of an adolescent gang that rides around on motorbikes.

Bresson is deliberately raising false expectations, testing a dramatic sense he has not the slightest intention of satisfying. He presents all the stock types of sentimentalized romance: the poor farm girl, wealthy lover, evil rival. But he reverses anticipated results. Chastity is a vain ideal; honesty goes unrewarded; villainy is not punished.

FOR ALL this human drama, the narrative focus remains on Balthazar throughout the film. It is his life that frames events, his development that determines the plot line, and when his fortune changes, the direction of the film likewise changes. This gives to all that happens an off-center perspective; events are glimpsed rather than defined.

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.

What Bresson is doing with all of this-the frustration of expectation, the off-center perspective, and the naturalism-is measuring the distance between vain idealization and reality. He triggers stock emotional responses and then demonstrates their misapplication. He poses sentimentality only to refute it. He is consciously near-missing the idyllic, falling back to the real.

Jacques is the paradigm of this idealism without perception. He returns toward the end of the film and proposes marriage to Marie. There is a cliche long-shot of the two of them climbing a hill with the countryside spread out behind, and for the moment it seems as though the film is returning to sentimentalism. But a few shots later Marie is seen raped, naked, cowering in the corner. The imminence of the ideal makes the real that much more painful.

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.

Bresson's success is precisely in this capacity to coax sentimentalized associations and then undercut them with his formal austerity-the down-turned camera angles, the quick cutting away from scenes, the static framing. What is left is a nature that is neither scorned nor valued, only accepted for the fact of its existence.

The 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 for him. all his symbolic reference-one realizes that all that is finally false and quite beside the point. That Balthazar cares nothing for human values. And that his example is not nobility but silence.