Jerzy Skolimowski (2022)
I watched Robert Bresson’s celebrated Au hasard Balthazar (1966) about twenty years ago, for the first and last time. I couldn’t believe that the cruel treatment of Balthazar, a donkey, was confined to Bresson’s script – that the animal(s) used in making the film didn’t suffer too. Even though no-animals-were-harmed assurances in closing credits have been standard practice for decades, I decided to see EO – veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s new version of Bresson’s tale – only after some hesitation, and I soon regretted my decision. Although his film is very different from Au hasard Balthazar, Skolimowski still tells an offensively sad story and the numerous differences from Bresson aren’t gains, except that EO is slightly shorter than its inspiration (eighty-eight minutes compared with ninety-five).
Skolimowski and Ewa Piakowska, who shares with him the screenplay credit, have a penchant for savage irony, sometimes oddly combined with donkey-based humour. At the start, EO is a performer in a Polish circus with Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), who loves and does her best to care properly for him. The circus is shut down, thanks to the efforts of Animal Rights activists and welfare-conscious local authority bylaws: since EO’s life without Kasandra is more precarious, the film seems to say the do-gooders have made matters worse. In the Bresson, when Balthazar joins a circus (about halfway through), he goes berserk after recognising one of his former, relatively less abusive, owners in the audience. This is echoed in EO when the donkey wanders onto a field where an amateur soccer match is happening. A penalty is awarded and EO starts to bray, disturbing the concentration of the penalty-taker, who fails to score. This hands victory to the opposing team – they launch into wild celebrations. Unlike Balthazar, EO has no reason to make such a noise; he does so simply in order to supply a bit of comedy – and to pay for it later that evening, when the aggrieved losers, after causing mayhem in the bar where the winners are drinking, see EO in the car park and beat him nearly to death.
For Anglophone audiences, the donkey’s name is almost bound to suggest Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh (the film’s Polish title is the phonetically similar IO) but it’s for other reasons that Skolimowski’s characterisation of EO, as he travels through life, makes one uncomfortable. My memory may be at fault about Au hasard Balthazar (as indicated above, I’ll not watch it again to check) but I don’t recall other animal species in Bresson’s film signifying much, except for the flock of sheep that gathers round Balthazar as he dies. EO is very different. Transported to stables after the circus closes, the donkey watches horses gambolling in the adjoining field and his attitude seems meant to be wistful. Wandering out of a farm into a nighttime forest, where men are hunting, EO sees a wolf in its death agony after being shot. Just before the football match, the protagonist trots through a town and stops at a shop window to look at tropical fish in an aquarium. At a fur factory, a man electrically shocks and kills terrified mink. It’s certainly one of the film’s few cheering moments when EO delivers a well-aimed hind-hoof kick that knocks the minx torturer unconscious (or worse) but the implication, here and elsewhere, that non-human animals are a kind of benign, oppressed (except for the gambolling horses) fellowship is quasi-Disney queasy. One doesn’t need to spend long watching David Attenborough series (themselves not above anthropomorphism) to be convinced that the animal kingdom, without human intervention, is mostly birth, copulation and death. The hero’s mug shot on the film’s poster, which makes the donkey look cute in an almost cartoonish way, proves more revealing than expected. EO was played by six different grey Sardinian donkeys. They are beautiful creatures but it’s startling how many reviewers of this widely-praised film describe EO as ‘adorable’, promise that ‘you’ll fall in love with him’, etc. Fair enough, though: Skolimowski definitely encourages this kind of reaction.
Although he sets out to show the world as EO experiences it, Skolimowski is so concerned to drive home a misanthropic message that he abandons the donkey’s point of view whenever it suits. Except for Kasandra, the animal hospital vet (Andrzej Szeremeta) who treats EO after the car park attack and, later on, a young Italian priest called Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), who finds the donkey tied to a pole and takes him home, the people in EO tend to treat animals unkindly or perfunctorily. But people also treat other people badly – those who don’t are unlikely to be rewarded. Mateo (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), a Polish truck driver transporting a collection of animals that includes EO, buys food at a stop-off and offers some to a hungry-looking woman hanging around the place (an encounter that EO can’t be witnessing). She sits and eats next to Mateo in the truck; he grins as he says to her, ‘And now for sex’; she makes a quick exit even as he protests that he was only joking. Another man then appears on the driver’s side of the vehicle and slits Mateo’s throat.
Vito lives with his stepmother (Isabelle Huppert), listed in the credits as ‘The Countess’. She complains about his gambling (which at least isn’t the usual vice of a screen priest nowadays), calls him names and starts smashing crockery. EO is nowhere to be seen throughout this exchange. It might seem appropriate for the Countess to be played by an aristocrat of the acting world but Isabelle Huppert’s brief appearance is rather bewildering. Unlike anyone else in EO, she’s an internationally famous face: she upstages the donkey as well as the other humans in the cast. By this stage, Skolimowski seems to be losing interest in explaining how EO gets from one situation to another. The Wikipedia plot synopsis, as it describes the last stages of EO’s journey to death, is more revealing than perhaps it means to be about this narrative sketchiness:
‘EO notices the gate into The Countess’ estate has opened, and he leaves. EO walks over a stone bridge in front of a large dam, watching the water flow. Sometime later EO is with cows being led into a slaughterhouse.’
There are repeated red-lit strobe sequences though even I’ll admit that in this case they’re not much harder to watch than quite a few other sequences. (There was an on-screen warning at the start about flashing lights though no advance e-mail from BFI as there had been last autumn for Aftersun.) The strobe is more notable as a symptom of the consistently spectacular (un-Bressonian) image-making by Skolimowski and his DP Michał Dymek. When at the end of EO’s life the screen goes black, text immediately appears on it confirming not only that no animals were harmed in the making of EO but that animal safety was always the film-makers’ first priority. I’m not questioning this in terms of the physical treatment of the animals involved; in that respect, the film is easier to take than Au hasard Balthazar. I still can’t easily accept that some of the six animals playing the title character didn’t have a sometimes stressful time, unless the editing and/or use of CGI is more ingenious than I realise or the donkeys are more gifted actors.
5 April 2023
