Directed by: Jerzy Skolimowski
Starring: Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzolo
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Veteran cineaste Jerzy Skolimowski has always proven to be more at ease with directing films focused on one character, whether human or animal. He demonstrated it at the beginning of this career with the Nouvelle Vague-esque and partially semi-autobiographical efforts Rysopis (Identification Marks None, 1964) and Walkower (1965), both featuring himself in the main role. In more recent years, he confirmed this trend with Venice winner Essential Killing (2010), an almost silent and austere-to-the-bone thriller starring Vincent Gallo.
Just like Essential Killing, EO is a adventurous one-hander and cinematic story of survival. On this occasion it is even easier to empathize with the film’s protagonist fleeing torture as it is not a suspected terrorist captured in Afghanistan, but a Sardinian donkey played by six different specimens on the movie set. Inspired to Robert Bresson’s classic Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), EO recounts the incredible journey from Poland to Italy of the titular circus jackass.
In the prologue Skolimowski shows several circus animals, which are released from slavery by a group of animal rights activists, and one of them is a camel. The two-humped mammal is the protagonist of a screenplay penned by Krzysztof Kieślowski and brought on the big screen without colors by Jerzy Stuhr in Duże zwierzę (The Big Animal, 2000). Stuhr used the camel has an expedient to denounce and ridicule the hypocrisy and backward mentality of life in rural Poland. The donkey, instead, serves Skolimowski to bring attention through feature film on cruelty to animals.
The musical score composed by Paweł Mykietyn and cinematography of Michał Dymek who also worked on Italian-set Słodki koniec dnia (Dolce Fine Giornata, 2019) and Sweat (2020) are also noteworthy. The most dreamlike sequences in EO are immersed in a red flickering light. Are they a figment of the donkey’s imagination or a visual representation of Eo’s dreams?
Skolimowski’s Canner Jury Prize winner is an outlandish tale with an unhappy ending packed with a surrealist twist that does not water down the Polish director’s cri de coeur on behalf of mistreated animals. EO is Skolimowski almost at his finest and Poland’s official pick for Best International Film at the 95th Academy Awards race.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on October 07, 2022