"As the son of an Episcopal priest, I have a semi-complex relationship with religion. I’ve remained fairly agnostic throughout most of my life, but I admire the seed of the Christian myth—that there can exist in the world a love that gives and asks nothing in return. No movie crystallizes this idea better than Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, which rips my heart out every time I watch it. The Christian ideal exists in humanity fleetingly, but by casting a donkey as his Christ surrogate, Bresson evokes the saintly disposition to which we should all aspire as effectively as (if not more so than) Roberto Rossellini does in The Flowers of St. Francis."
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