London Film Festival: EO Review
Jerzy Skolimowski takes us through the deep and dark world of animal cruelty and exploitation.
Joint winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, EO, made its way to my home city and it was just as harrowing as the first time I watched it. Jerzy Skolimowski’s masterfully soulful film forces us to experience a complex and cruel world through the lens of a donkey. Both inspired and inspiring, we are taken on the harshest journey imaginable: the journey of an animal alongside humans.
We begin in a disorienting space with flashing red lights and a donkey on the ground. Encouraged to stand by Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), we see that the donkey, EO, is with a travelling circus. Whether or not he has any particular act to follow, the sensory overload brings us (literally) eye-to-eye with EO’s fear of standing in a circus in front of a drunken audience. However, when the circus’s animals are repossessed, EO embarks on a bewildering odyssey from place to place with little opportunity for respite.
The concept of EO harkens back to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, where he briefly narrates the life of a donkey that is passed between owners who are cruel to him in their own ways. In terms of sadistic Eastern European cinema, I was also transported back to the senseless callousness of Václav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird in which a Czech child is tossed into the brutal crossfire of WW2. There seems to be no rest from the severity of the world, the only tenderness in sight being that of the world’s victims.
The main difference between EO and these two works is the adorable connection between EO and Kasandra. Although he is separated from her early on in the film, memories of their love and affection carry him through the direst of straits and even carry her to him on his birthday. The idea of being reunited his Kasandra pushes him through severe injury and abandonment. It’s not often that you see such a heartwrenching bond on screen between a human and animal that isn’t a dog.
The absurdities of human behaviour that EO often makes no sense and borders on comical. From the violent raves of local football rivalries to telenovela-level romance between an Italian vicar (Lorenzo Zurzolo) and his French stepmother (Isabelle Huppert), EO suffers from their violence or disregard all the same. Regardless of context or intent, the animals always suffer under mankind’s folly, excess, and cruelty.
The visual effects were mostly organic and consisted mainly of changes in lighting and savvy camerawork. With very little dialogue, the visuals did most of the talking. The cinematography (Michal Dymek) was beautifully varied as EO was transported between Italian villas and foreboding mountains. The miniscule line of ants marching along a wooden fence and the dizzying motion of a wind turbine culminated in a considered and delightfully dissonant mise-en-scène. This coincided harmoniously with the music (Paweł Mikietyn) which encapsulating EO’s emotional state. Domineering orchestral pieces bellowed in the panic of being shoved into a lorry, seeing only the flashing white lines on the road and sweet minimalistic tunes with Kasandra.
Despite the heavy subject matter, there is sometimes room for humour. The donkey’s eagerness to distance himself from horses and his awkward presence at a local football team’s victory celebration, there are tidbits of charm laced throughout the film. Secondly, the heavy subject matter doesn’t land us with a heavy moral. There is some obvious implication about exploiting animals for food, fashion, and frivolity, but we are left with no real instruction on what we should do with this as audience.
Frankly, EO is rhetorically streets ahead of any factory farming documentary. When we consider the wellbeing of animals, it is not enough to watch people be violent towards cows and pigs. The shock of graphic violence wears off after a while and 2-week veganism ultimately achieves nothing. Skolimowski invites us into the psyche of the animals we abuse and leaves a lasting impression on the viewer. We are encouraged to ask serious questions: How can we be kinder to animals in an industrialised society? How long can you blow cigarette smoke in a donkey’s direction before it counts as animal abuse? But most importantly, is our longstanding dominion over nature the right way to go?
Verdict: 5/5 stars.
