Jerzy Skolimowski’s film “EO” in the cinema: Big donkey – culture

Red strobe light, circles, angular shapes: the film begins under full stress during a circus performance in the ring. The protagonist doesn’t seem to know what’s happening to him, but he has to endure it. The young woman who lets him perform the tricks is affectionate to him and provides him with cuddles and carrots. But the arena, the circus, the spectacle, all of that belongs to the realm of the human being. He, the donkey named Eo, can’t do anything with it.

Then the circus goes broke, Eo is sold, and the animal begins a long and surreal odyssey, which Jerzy Skolimowski traces in his beautiful film “EO”. This year it was in competition at the Cannes Festival, where Skolimowski, the famous Polish filmmaker, deservedly received the Jury Prize. The main actor named Tako, who was able to prevail against all other applicants in the donkey casting, went away empty-handed, as did his five donkey doubles, whose names are mentioned in the credits. Unfortunately, there is just as little to win for donkeys at film festivals as in real life.

In the film, Eo keeps changing hands. He ends up in the stables of a dressage hall and with animal therapists, where he serves as a cuddle for children with Down syndrome. He becomes the mascot of a football club, and opposing fans beat him up in an animal hospital. It is to be processed into donkey salami. He gets involved with a sadistic animal tormentor, but also with an Italian priest with gambling debts and a countess played by Isabelle Huppert, who take him into their Tuscan country estate.

The hero wants freedom – people’s love leaves him unperturbed

Eo could already have reached paradise: grazing carefree on lush green meadows in warm temperatures in the shade of majestic pine trees, you can hardly find it better as a donkey. But since Eo is extremely freedom-loving and he is just as unimpressed by human love as by the painful circumstances of his existence, he will escape from there again and stoically trot towards his fate, which he shares with so many other farm animals on our planet.

The film is a homage to the modern cinema classic “For Example Balthasar” by Robert Bresson from 1966. Bresson already told the passion story of a donkey, whereby the animal maintained a much more intimate relationship with the female protagonist, then embodied by Anne Wiazemsky, than the is the case in “EO”. Bresson’s donkey was a Christian icon that always embodied human suffering. Skolimowski, on the other hand, tells the story entirely from the animal’s perspective.

Seen from this, the realm of the human seems like a theater of the absurd – whether it is the circus, the grand opening of a riding arena, the photo shoot for a noble white horse that Eo can only eye jealously, or the brutalized , nationalistically colored rites of Polish village footballers. At the end, Huppert and her priest act out a scene in the kitchen of their country estate that deals with debts, disappointed expectations and broken relationships.

In contrast, Skolimowski, who is also a painter, creates his own, visually impressive world of images for his donkey. Sometimes the camera takes the perspective of a bird gliding over a red-colored river bed, sometimes the perspective of an ant watching Eo from the grass, making him gigantic and out of focus. In the night forest, Eo enters a fairytale world made up of frogs, bubbling water and spiders. And a four-legged robot surprisingly embodies the beaten-up donkey’s vision of being able to walk again.

In this way, Skolimowski explores the soul of a donkey, its spirituality. The donkeys of this world may not care. But it might make us viewers a little better, at least for the duration of this film.

EO, Poland / Italy 2022. – Director: Jerzy Skolimowski. Book: Ewa Piaskowska, Skolimowski. Camera: Michal Dymek. With Tako, Sandra Drzymalska, Tomasz Organek. Rapid Eye Movies, 88 mins Theatrical release: December 22, 2022.

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