"The Moor ... will tenderly be led by the nose as asses are"
(Shakespeare, Othello, 1:3).
Writer/director Jerzy Skowlimowski’s EO may be a reference to a donkey’s sound or a line from Old McDonald, but rest assured you will see it is one of the best donkey movies ever. Based on Robert Bresson’s iconic 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar; Jerzy’s impressionistic commentary on living from the perspective of a darling donkey is a trenchant take on what it’s like to be an outsider buffeted by the whims of indifferent humanity. The journey crosses Poland and Italy in an odyssey of sorrow and joy.
Although we are used to witnessing Christ at Easter time riding a donkey to challenge the pompous Romans and Othello hardly a docile ass, as well as the recent donkey in Banshees of Inisherin, titular EO has no entourage or exalted purpose other than the love he can sparingly experience along his trail. It’s like a moody documentary that somehow makes EO a beautiful animal.
After opening with the donkey starring in a Polish circus, we travel with him in various episodes like hunters shooting wolves and skinning foxes, riding in a truck with its driver getting his throat cut, and anonymously galloping to an abattoir fate so he can provide meat for salami. Along the way our placid ass finds love with the young circus performer and his caretaker, Kasandra (Sandra Dryzmalska), who gives him tactile affection the director makes sure we witness. Eventually animal activists separate the two as he’s sent to an animal farm.
The director laces the adventure with stunning imagery and powerful sound in place of a bothersome narrative. We and the donkey also see outside of his confining trailer a herd of horses, probably wild, that he longingly watches; the irony that he will never be a horse or free is there without being obtrusive. On that horse farm, he’s pretty much alone as the attention is given to the beautiful horses.
When out of the blue we are treated to a handsome young man taking EO to the home of a countess (Isabelle Huppert), Skolimowski lets us see this defrocked priest as another outsider like donkey. Really, though, this odd sequence is not quite as connected thematically as most of the others.
While each episode could stand separately on the topic of enslavement or at least of disenfranchisement, as a whole the work is a plea for the rights of minorities and an alarm about animal abuse. As a work of art, EO stands tall for the power of impressionism in the hands of an 84-year-old auteur who doesn’t need voiceover or text or dialogue to tell an artful story about a beloved animal and our abuse of beauty.
EO
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski (11 Minutes)
Screenplay: Skolimowski (Knife in the Water)
Cast: Isabelle Huppert (Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Elle)
Run Time: 1h 26m
Rating: NR
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
