Review: ‘EO, A Gorgeous Portrait Of A Donkey, Is The Movie Youve Been Braying For
One of 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's brightest films, Eo, is a sublime ode to nature when a stray donkey gets lost in an ancient forest. Night fell, but the moonlight illuminated this silent dark world in all its living splendor. A small frog glides over the surface of a seething river. A crawling spider spins its web. The owl flies from the top of the tree to the donkey, as if noticing the presence of an intruder. There are also a pair of howling wolves, a wary red fox and, over time, a series of green laser beams that signal the presence of a hunter nearby, whose shot shatters the silence of the forest.
The entire series tells much of the film's story in miniature. From time to time this donkey, known as EO (roughly from the sound he makes), had a moment of freedom, but a few people came and brought him back into danger. If this makes "EO" sound like an acronym for violence, rest assured it's not, though it may reflect Skolimowski's longtime commitment to films like Le Départ (1967) and Essential Killing (2010). ). ). . He knows that humans can be kind, but they can also be cruel due to their often callous indifference to the rights and welfare of other beings. The beauty that Skolimowski and cinematographer Michal Dymek show us in EO, frame by frame, perhaps the most beautiful picture of the year, is not to deny cruelty, but to respond to it.
It opens with a flash of red light on the screen and a thunderous passage from Pavel Mikitin's orchestral score that hypnotically vibrates and builds. In this first moment, EO becomes part of a circus performance where the young artist Kassandra (Sandra Drozimalska) hugs him, strokes his coat, and feeds him carrot cake. Cassandra turns out to be the love of her life, the man of her dreams, and moves into the house next door after their breakup. But so far, Skolimovsky has included the EO motive or desire in addition to his basic urges to eat, rest, and roam. As the director shows, usually in close-ups of E.O.'s big eyes - they're kind of incredible and incredibly expressive - there's a limit to how much we can penetrate or imagine the donkey's inner life.
On the other hand, another joyfully said on his behalf, "Can't you see that this animal is suffering?" During the protest, the worker shouted that he would break up the circus and send Yo and his four-legged partner in different directions. The rest of this fast-paced, relentless 86-minute film (which Skolimowski co-wrote with his wife Eva Piaskowska) follows the donkey's zigzag journey through Poland to Italy, over man-made mountains and bridges, through tunnels. and wind turbines to and through magical forests. At one point, in a shot so brutal it almost seems supernatural, a herd of horses appears beside Ea's carriage, their splendid freedom making his isolation a painful relief.
Along the way, there will be a brief stop at a newly opened barn where Yoh is pampered (but intimidated) by tame horses, and a high-profile sporting event where he becomes the winning team's mascot. From there he was taken to a large medical facility, where, out of human compassion, he was not put to sleep, but cured. (Some of his neighbors aren't so lucky.) From there, he travels with a few vagrants and ends up in an Italian villa where the countess, played by Isabelle Huppert, smashes some plates and casts a seductive glance at a handsome priest (Lorenzo Zurzola). .. In my opinion, Huppert also became a kind of epitome of the great European arthouse cinema that this brilliant film heralds, and its humble, animalistic (as opposed to pompous, humanistic) concern.
This is not to say that "Eo", which shared the third jury prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, has gone unnoticed or unknown, although it can easily be lost in the few theaters in the United States where it will, as expected, be shown on the big screen. screen. When I first saw "EO" at Cannes, it was described, sometimes offensively, as an almost modern remake of Robert Bresson's 1966 masterpiece "O Khasar Balthazar" about the life, death and extraordinary beauty of such a donkey. Both Balthazar and Ea were loved and loved by humans, and both were forced to become beasts of burden. Both of them are silent witnesses of various human horrors and absurdities.
Skolimovsky, for his part, considers Au Hassard Balthazar his source of inspiration and starting point. While both films share an obvious liking for their characters, their visual and rhythmic differences are equally clear. Bresson's majestic black-and-white compositions and subtle transitions are a far cry from Agnieszka Glinska's jagged editing and Dymek's rich cinematography and vibrant colors, especially angry red brushstrokes. (The boldness of the depiction speaks to Skolimovsky's past as an artist.) And while Bresson places a complex human drama against the backdrop of Balthasar, the man in Eo is an interesting but relatively short-lived figure. Their problems and suffering - one cries, the other dies - concern us only to the extent that it concerns EO.
Yoh himself plays six donkeys named Hola, Taco, Marita, Itore, Rocco and Melo who blend into the characters we know and love through fluid cinematography and editing. The intimacy of the cinematography—the loving attention it pays to Yoh's desperate, now greedy eyes, her planted ears, her silky gray fur, and the juicy string of carrots that adorns her throat at one point—is palpable. Love it. Skolimowski isn't really trying to capture the EO perspective, some of the shots look like they're bird's eye view, with low angles to the ground and slightly blurry edges. He seems more interested in getting a feel for what it's like to be in the presence of EO, getting you close enough that you feel like you can talk to him, smell him, and run your fingers over his fur.
In EO, the camera doesn't just follow the story or record the action. His restless exploratory movement expresses a kind of common consciousness, the consciousness of communication between different representatives of the animal world, regardless of whether they run together across the field or live in one narrow paddock. The beauty of this film is to extend that friendship to all the people in front of the camera whose destinies are inextricably linked to EO, whether they realize it or not. And finally, this friendship extends to viewers, and especially to those of us who go to the movies to shake things up, to be touched and to have our sense of the universe gently shaken or realigned. Just because the world we share with EO is cold and cruel doesn't mean we have to be.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
