More than a decade onwards from his man-on-the-run thriller Essential Killing, veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski makes a surprising return to filmmaking – and the A-list festival circuit – with something resoundingly similar. Just like Vincent Gallo’s dialogue-free protagonist in that 2010 film, EO’s mute, central character hits the road, meets different people (killing some of them), and eventually acknowledges his surroundings as one vast purgatory.
The one big difference, however, is that Skolimowski’s lead this time round is a donkey, an animal spiraling its way through the horrifying sinkhole of a human-infested world. Given the film’s presence at Cannes, where it is in the running for the Palme d’Or, EO‘s nearest equivalent would be the recent Terence Malick films which came and went on the Croisette, movies boasting moments of sublime, visual ecstasy – here courtesy of Mychal Dymek’s mix of widescreen shots, intimate close-ups and drone cinematography – and a narrative that is painfully obvious and vacuous.
To his credit, Skolimowski is unquestionably pure in his love of animals and nature, but he’s equally naïve in offering such simplistic, near-caricatural representations of modern humanity. His critique against the bad things people do are as subtle as an animal rights protest in front of a circus (and there’s actually one in the film). There’s nothing wrong with tackling these issues head on, but he has simply refashioned the debates whirling around the world today – migration, the environment, tribalist violence – into brief, random vignettes which fail to ignite or engage.
But EO is also problematic on an aesthetic level, as it stutters over its inconsistent way of situating the point-of-view of the story. Sometimes, we are supposed to be looking at the world through the donkey’s eyes, complete with warped vision and muffled sounds; at other instances, we bear witness to events happening several removes from the animal’s actual experience – specifically, the episode in which Isabelle Huppert, playing a puzzling character called “the countess”, stirs up a stink with her prodigal stepson inside her mansion.
All this hee-haw prevents EO from fulfilling its potential as a transcendent 21st century version of Au Hasard Balthazar, the Robert Bresson film – also about a donkey’s rite of passage through an uncaring world – which once moved a younger and brasher Skolimowski to tears (as he says in the press material). While Bresson rejected sentimentality and refused to “humanise the donkey”, as the French master once said, Skolimowski bolts the other way, as he zooms in on the donkey’s tears and pictures its heart-wrenching braying as it gazes at an aquarium of confined goldish in a pet shop window.
Still, the sufficiently valid message and amply staggering imagery at hand should help EO sustain a stubborn and slow-moving march through the festival circuit. Some might even brave a limited release, if marketed in the same breath as The Four Times, Michelangelo Frammatino’s far superior reflection on the natural cycles of life.
The film begins with a donkey, EO (or Hi-han, as he’s known in the original Polish dialogue, and played variously throughout the film by six Sardinian donkeys), going through its motions as a circus act. Its caring and loving human partner, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), stands up for him against the brutal ringmaster (Tomasz Organek). This bond unravels, however, when officials come in to close down and confiscate all the animals at the debt-ridden circus. Thus begins EO’s journey, as he navigates an ominous world filled with manipulative employers, murderous thugs and refugee-preying truck drivers (well, one misogynist truck driver, but there you go). And, of course, there’s that short appearance by Huppert and Italian star Lorenzo Zuzzolo, in an Italy-shot scene which jars with everything that goes before and says nothing whatsoever.
The most stunning shot in EO, in which the donkey walks over a footbridge under a mammoth dam, is proof of the 84-year-old Skolimowski’s strong knack for visual beauty (he also paints) as well as his shaky world view. The swelling waters are shown to be flowing in reverse, upstream and upwards; it perhaps symbolises Skolimowski’s yearning for a pure and innocent past not blighted by modernity. This notion materializes as monstrosities, like wind turbines as aliens, and EO’s dystopic dreams of robotic donkeys. The Polish filmmaker’s ongoing desire to remind us of our own animal-abusing failings definitely merits all the appreciation he can get, but he might risk sounding like Eeyore if he is to make his point merely with such simplistic, heavy-handed bombast.
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Screenwriters: Jerzy Skolimowski, Ewa Piakowska
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzulo, Sandra Drzymalska, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz
Producers: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski
Executive producers: Jeremy Thomas
Director of photography: Mychal Dymek
Editor: Agnieszka Glinska
Production designer: Miroslaw “Mietek” Koncewicz
Costume designer: Katarzyna Lewinska
Music composer: Pawel Mykietyn
Production companies: Skopia Film, Alien Films
World sales: HanWay Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Polish, Italian, French, English
86 minutes
