EO – first-look review

Named for the sound a don­key makes, Eo (“Eee-ooo, eee-oo”) fol­lows one such noble beast as it trav­els across the breadth of Poland and beyond, bear­ing mute wit­ness to a car­ni­val of human­i­ty at its best, worst, and weirdest.

In its con­cep­tion — as an exis­ten­tial mus­ing on man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, endurance of suf­fer­ing, and capac­i­ty for grace across the blink of a lifes­pan – as well as in the out­line of sev­er­al of its scenes, Eo is an incred­i­ble and unlike­ly act of hubris: a remake of Robert Bresson’s inner-cir­cle Film Stud­ies 101 mas­ter­piece Au Hasard Balthazar.

But it’s also shot through with the out­ré sym­bol­ism and impul­siv­i­ty that have long char­ac­terised its director’s long, strange career, par­tic­u­lar­ly its late, noth­ing-to-prove stages. The old­est direc­tor in Com­pe­ti­tion at this year’s Cannes, Jerzy Skolimows­ki is 84 years young, and he is absolute­ly vib­ing.

Eo opens at a small trav­el­ing cir­cus, where the tit­u­lar don­key (played by across the film six dif­fer­ent ani­mals, who match each other’s per­for­mances seam­less­ly in an act­ing mas­ter­class) per­form­ers as part of a duo act with an ador­ing young per­former, who nuz­zles Eo’s nose and strokes his fur à la Balthazar’s Anne Wiazem­sky. (They go on right before ​“The Fab­u­lous Cubeman”.)

But Eo changes hands often through­out the course of the film, for the first time fol­low­ing an ani­mal-rights protest. (“Train­ing is tor­ture,” say some of the hand-let­tered signs, an accu­sa­tion the film tries to answer in an end-title card. No ani­mals were harmed, all were ven­er­at­ed, etc etc.)

The sto­ry daisy-chains its way along with fre­quent absurd con­trivances, a clown­ish nar­ra­tive log­ic that speaks to Skolimowski’s athe­ist meta­physics. Eo ends up in a horse farm, becomes the mas­cot of a rur­al town’s soc­cer team and inad­ver­tent­ly incites a riot with a rival club’s hooli­gans, toils in fac­to­ry farms, is bought and sold on the black mar­ket, cross­es inter­na­tion­al bor­ders, goes under­ground and into the Alps, accom­pa­nies met­al­head lor­ry dri­vers, devel­op­men­tal­ly dis­abled chil­dren, bureau­crats, and a defrocked priest.

Skolimowski’s vin­tage films of the ​’60s and ​’70s – made in his native Poland, France, Eng­land and all over – fit close­ly but unclas­si­fi­ably with­in sev­er­al nation­al New Waves; wild­ly diverse in sub­ject mat­ter, they fre­quent­ly fea­tured the era’s broad, fun­house-mir­ror satir­i­cal impuls­es and sub­jec­tive jump-cut ter­ror. Films like Deep End and The Shout are dat­ed, but appeal­ing­ly so, less shrill or hot-aired than many con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous Art­house Gold­en Age come­dies and sen­su­al dramas.

Here, he offers sketch-com­i­cal views of Pol­ish nation­al­ism and machis­mo, EU migra­tion, the lega­cy of the Holo­caust, and bour­geois deca­dence in the form of a vamp­ish step­moth­er played by an unex­pect­ed cin­e­mat­ic leg­end. There are chil­dren at the begin­ning of their life, men at the vio­lent end of theirs, and a veterinarian’s clin­ic where some­one pos­es the key ques­tion of the film: ​“Why should it suffer?”

Through­out, Skolimows­ki uses fish­eye lens­es from odd cam­era posi­tions, giv­ing a dis­tort­ed view of humanity’s foibles. Updat­ing his career-long uncen­tered, fad­dish style, he explores the poet­ic sur­re­al­ist poten­tial of mod­ern film tech­niques with strob­ing red lights, tran­shu­man­ist drone-shot inter­ludes, and an intense score incor­po­rat­ing tra­di­tion­al accor­dions and EDM bass bump­ing; in one scene, Eo stum­bles into a wolf cull shot like a rave, with green laser-sight beams light­ing up the for­est like a rave.

There are occa­sion­al p.o.v. shots – such as when some­one pass­es Eo a joint – but through­out, the ani­mal is a gen­tle, Kuleshov­ian pres­ence who grounds the action with every quizzi­cal turn of his adorable pointy earns and poignant sto­ic countenance.

In one sense, Eo is an evo­lu­tion of Skolimowski’s 2010 sur­vival thriller, Essen­tial Killing, which abstract­ed the pol­i­tics of CIA black sites into the tale of an escaped Tal­iban pris­on­er on the run in a pri­mal win­try land­scape, fight­ing against and sub­sist­ing with­in nature. The next log­i­cal place to go from such an ele­men­tal sto­ry is to make one star­ring a don­key, instead of Vin­cent Gallo.

What use is plot, to a don­key? Or to an athe­ist, for that mat­ter. Think of Skolimow­ki at this stage of his career and life as a film­mak­er hap­pi­ly graz­ing, indulging in an ani­mal need for cinema.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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