Stream it:
|
Own it:
|
With: Sandra Drzymalska, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Tomasz Organek, Lolita Chammah, Agata Sasinowska, Anna Rokita, Michal Przybyslawski, Gloria Iradukunda
|
Written by: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski
|
Directed by: Jerzy Skolimowski
|
MPAA Rating: NR
|
Language: Polish, Italian, English, French, Spanish, with English subtitles
|
Running Time: 86
|
|
Date: 11/18/2022
|
|
|
|
Donkey Song
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski seems to re-surface every couple of decades, adding to his list of movies that includes Deep End (1970), Moonlighting (1982), and Essential Killing (2010). But EO is something different, a plotless tale seen mostly through the eyes of a long-suffering donkey, not unlike the format of Robert Bresson's masterpiece Au hasard Balthzar (1966). EO — named for the sound a donkey makes — is played by six different animals. He is unceremoniously ejected from a circus, where his handler Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska) loves and caresses him. On the road, he's occasionally taken in, put to work, or trapped, or ignored. We human viewers begin to question our relationships with animals, and with EO in particular, to whom we become quite attached. Do we have a mutual love, or a symbiosis, or are we using each other for various reasons? The animals in the film react with each other in fascinating ways as well, sometimes even with respect, while humans in the film treat each other abominably. Skolimowski occasionally slips in weird asides, like red-colored hellscapes, or an episode with a robot dog, but sequences like the one in which EO walks down a long tunnel as bats screech by his head, is stunning. EO itself has a love for animals, but animal lovers will find themselves both moved and shattered by its images.
|
