EO

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. In short, Jerzy Skolimows­ki is 84 years young, and he is absolute­ly vibing.

EO opens at a small trav­el­ing cir­cus, where the tit­u­lar don­key per­forms 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. But EO changes hands often through­out the course of the film, for the first time fol­low­ing an ani­mal-rights protest. The sto­ry then 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 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, the direc­tor 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. Again, like a rave.

In one sense, EO is an evo­lu­tion of Skolimowski’s 2010 sur­vival thriller, Essen­tial Killing, the tale of an escaped Tal­iban pris­on­er on the run in a pri­mal win­try land­scape. The next log­i­cal place to go from such an ele­men­tal sto­ry is to make one star­ring a don­key, instead of Vin­cent Gal­lo. The final ques­tion, then is: 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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