EO
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
We’re covering the Academy Award nominees that we haven’t reviewed yet.
One of film's most depressing films is Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar: a union of torture between a young girl and a donkey that have to face society together. Relentless without any glimpses of hope, Bresson's opus places us in the shoes of the various people abused on the regular by the skewed ways of civilization, be they women or the working class. While there has been a lot of progress with how females are considered in the workplace or as respected individuals (I would argue there is still a lot of work needed), the working class is still treated like garbage in the grand scheme of things. Thus, Bresson's donkey allegory still holds up: we work and are overworked until we die. End of story.
Jerzy Skolimowski is a staple of Polish cinema by now, and he has arrived to this point of his decades-long career. Not only is he inspired by Au Hasard Balthazar, he saw fit to modernize this tragic fable for the new age (while only focusing on the donkey portions of the original film). EO is a short yet punishing road film with the titular donkey as the main star. Unlike Bresson's film, EO isn't solely harrowing, and there are moments of little Eo's journey where the donkey actually receives some love (although clearly not enough). EO is far from a carbon copy. What Skolimowski does instead is show us the different scenarios of Eo's life and how different crowds respond differently to him. It's a fascinating study that is already good as a concept, yet the many years of Skolimowski's career have wisened the filmmaker, allowing him to make this film even greater than it is on paper.
EO is a desperate cinematic experience that pulls its audience through some real turmoil.
Eo is a circus donkey that has already lived a rough life at the expense of entertainment for others. When the film begins, he goes on an adventure that is mostly against his will, as he is transported across Poland in a myriad of ways, with new owners exchanging him and various circumstances swooping him up. While there isn't any cohesion to this story outside of Eo's neverending experience, we get a bit of a bittersweet look at Poland through the eyes of a skilled director that has lived long enough to enlighten the film's viewers with depth and caution. We even have a brush with elitism and the upper class and see how a donkey would be received in such a setting (featuring a surprise appearance from Isabelle Huppert, although this wouldn't be any less of a shock than her turn in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, to be fair). Eo is abused, hugged, rejected, treated as a joke (both warmly and coldly), and passed around as a commodity all within the same hour and a half. It's quite the undertaking for this lost soul.
EO could have felt like a series of vignettes, but it instead feels fluid: like we are being yanked by our chains through Poland in the same way our protagonist donkey is. Your heart will bleed for poor Eo, but rest assured that no animals, especially donkeys, were hurt during the filming of this motion picture. We are thankfully past this point of cinema, I hope. Knowing that the donkey is okay (well, all six or so that acted as the sole Eo), I still felt every ounce of hurt that came his way. The moments of joy were few and far between, and they kept the film going (pure misery without some sort of pivoting is next to impossible to master; even Bresson's film leapt from crisis to crisis and of two different storylines).
EO carries on some of the themes of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar — that the lower class is worked to death — to a whole new light.
We hop between our own perspective and little Eo's point of view: a red and monochromatic, low vantage point of what he is experiencing. The film is shot incredibly well around these sequences as well, as a beautiful world and its brutal inner workings feel almost harmonized in this complicated look at the highs and lows of life. Just like that Eo ends: with the promise of more to come. Life sadly doesn't wait for us individual spirits. The ongoing narrative of existence just keeps going, even when the characters within it depart. Do we feel happy that Eo is spared of more suffering, or are we woeful knowing that this donkey never had the life it deserved? I feel both after finishing EO: a rare film that resolves suddenly yet perfectly. It's the final point of this filmic essay on the blessings and curses of being a part of civilization and this thing called life.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.