‘EO’: An existentialist odyssey of a donkey

Transformed into one of the great sensations on the circuit of festivals and critics associations, it finally arrives in commercial halls ‘Eo’, the return to cinema of the Polish director, playwright and painter Jerzy Skolimowski. His landing to the delight of the public comes after winning the prize for best direction at the 67 Seminci in Valladolidthe Jury Prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, the European University Film Award and the Best Music Award at the 35th European Film Awards and to aspire to be one of the favorites for the Oscars in the Best International Film category, where she represents Poland.

Skolimowski, with this proposal, not only shows his affinity for animals and the defense of their rights, but also takes the opportunity to an authentic portrait of the catalogs of the different faces of human cruelty, all through the eyes of a donkey, the protagonist of the film and the one that gives the film its title. It concerns a modern and contemporary reinterpretation of ‘At random, Baltasar’, the jewel created by Robert Bresson in 1966.

“Eo” is released from the circus in which he was being held, but this causes the donkey to be separated from his handler, which leads him to live an authentic odyssey in search of that lost friendship. Skolimowski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eva Piaskowska, creates a real journey of hardship which he picks up from the perspective of the donkey, which implies a series of sequences and shots that make it possible to transform ‘Eo’ into an extremely free exercise, both in structure and in formthough its narrative is a tragedy with operatic overtones.

An animalistic tale with a protagonist full of charisma

It is fascinating how that forward flight of the donkey, interpreted by six different donkeys, called Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco and Tako, Skolimowski creates a fairy tale in which the protagonist evokes the darkest children’s fairy tales well, such as Collodi’s ‘Pinocchio’; especially in reference to a being who represents the purest innocence and how this is won by the cruelty and cynicism of life itself. The donkey meets and reunites with a multitude of characters who represent the relationship between humans and animals in an ambivalent way.

This is where Skolimowski focuses, with a story that tries to escape conventional narrativewanting to relate to those fairy tales with unfinished endings or outcomes that do not meet the needs of the audience. The director himself took Ovid’s “The Metamorphoses” or Apuleius’ “The Golden Ass” as a reference. On the other hand, the use of a donkey as the protagonist is very symbolic, an animal in danger of extinction due to the modernization of rural life and whose intelligence is higher than what society assumes, due to the popular stories about its behavior.

With a cameo also by Isabelle Huppert, ‘Eo’ highlights Skolimowski’s mastery when it comes to directing and daring with sequences worthy of the most abstract art house and art house cinema. After Andrea Arnold managed to bring the charisma of the Luma steer in ‘Vaca’ and Viktor Kossakovsky did the same with a sow in ‘Gunda’, now it’s the turn of the donkey Eo.

Note: 7

The best: The charisma of Eo. The donkey has a charm worthy of a movie star.

Worse: Skolimowski goes too far in portraying human cruelty. The donkey fails to know the goodness of any of the humans, which causes the outcome of him to be too bleak for a story that needed a little more light.