EO (2022 | Poland | 86 minutes | Jerzy Skolimowski)
It’s a big year for donkeys on film, but although Jenny is a sparkling figure in The Banshees of Inisherin, there’s no competition for my favorite. That’s an easy call. On a minute-by-minute basis, I have seen no film this year as surprising in framing, construction, and plotting than Jerzy Skolimowski’s truly dazzling film EO. Taking loose inspiration from Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, it is a donkey dreamscape of Malickian proportions, an animal welfare allegory whose humble rapscallion title equine goes everywhere and sees everything.
I firmly believe that great art can’t be spoiled, but will avoid attempting to summarize the plot of EO beyond its most basic parameters. As the film opens we meet a brilliantly expressive circus performer who’s parted from his beloved human companion by a well-intentioned law prohibiting traveling animal exhibitions. Named for the braying sound he makes, EO is torn from the familiarity of the big top and the companionship of the beautiful dancer who holds him dear. Soon, the donkey becomes our itinerant guide through the various rural and urban landscapes of Europe on a journey that stretches from Poland to Italy.
His wanderings become a tour of the various lifestyles available to both humans and domesticated animals, spanning the full gamut of from care to indifference to outright cruelty. His life after the circus includes stints as sort of ambassador with an endless supply of carrots around his neck, as working animal pulling carts, and even briefly as a small town soccer mascot. Events take circuitous turns, sometimes seemingly at his own instigation, other times at the mercy (or lack thereof) of callous humans. Across these settings, traversing menacing forests, and all forms of an itinerant life on the road are all audaciously captured with Michal Dymek’s dynamic cinematography in an escalating series of evermore expressive film techniques to achieve what the press materials describe as capturing the anthropomorphic eyes of a “sentient” donkey.
The story is best viewed as an occasionally dark fable and a wide-eyed road picture of extreme serendipity. Scene by scene, the plot seemingly takes ninety-degree turns through multi-dimensional space and I was never not enraptured by its audacity. With eyes softly outlined in white and incredible gravitas, the six donkeys playing the title role (Taco, Ola, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco, and Mela, bray their names!) evoke a solemnity of spirit, a penchant for adventure, and a sense of perpetual curiosity. In any other film, a human cameo toward the end would have been a jaw-dropper of epic proportions, but after the exploits I’d shared with that noble donkey it barely registered as outside the ordinary. By some miracle, when I saw it at TIFF the screening was on an IMAX screen (even though it had not been filmed or enhanced as such). If an opportunity to see it in any such available immersive environment ever presents itself to you, I beg you to treat yourself to it and share EO’s journey through the best and worst the world has to offer with an open mind and a tender heart. It’s one of the most remarkable films, donkey or otherwise, of the year.
A previous version of this review ran when EO had its North American premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival. Since then, it’s been selected as Poland’s entry for the Best International Film Oscar. You can see it in Seattle beginning on December 16 at SIFF Uptown as well as from January 4-8 at Northwest Film Forum.