A prime year for cinematic donkeys: That’s one way to remember 2022.
“Prime” does not mean “kind.” Jenny, the wee miniature companion of Colin Farrell’s character in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” provides reliable emotional support for a lonely soul, at least until Jenny meets a fate befitting a Martin McDonagh tale of woe. In “Triangle of Sadness,” Ruben Östlund’s black comedy now streaming, a donkey meets an even grislier fate, thanks to hungry survivors of a luxury cruise ship disaster.
“Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!” wrote the poet Robert Burns. Man’s inhumanity to donkeys can beat those numbers any day.
Now comes “EO,” which puts its donkey of the title front and center. Clear-eyed and full of subtle feeling and empathy without solemnity, this is co-writer and director Jerzy Skolimowski’s first feature in seven years. It’s also very good.
I frankly dreaded it, since my admiration for its clearest inspiration, Robert Bresson’s widely cherished 1966 “Au Hasard Balthazar,” does not extend to any real love or feeling for it. (I’m with film critic Pauline Kael, who found it suffocatingly pious.) But Skolimowski has managed something quietly remarkable with “EO.”
In its harshest moments — one run-in with a drunken soccer team pushes its luck in pure emotional exploitation — the film does not shy away from how humans have disregarded or brutalized animals for centuries. Yet Skolimowski’s brisk pacing, his matter-of-fact way of revealing EO’s point of view, leads to a paradoxical humanizing perspective without phony anthropomorphic touches. In other words, he’s a donkey-donkey, not a cartoon donkey, or a Hollywood donkey.
Skolimowski and his co-writer (and wife) Ewa Piaskowska take the imaginative leap of giving EO fond, heartbroken memories of the key human in his life. She is Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), the donkey’s partner in a circus act and a source of protection against the carnival’s meaner elements.
The story proceeds episodically, as EO is relocated first to one farm, then another, then breaks out on his own. Much of the time, the donkey acts as a witness to strange human rituals and behaviors. He watches a bureaucratic ribbon-cutting ceremony without comment. At one point he regards a fashion shoot involving a horse, from a discreet distance. Later, a well- (or poorly) timed bray distracts the players in a fiercely competitive soccer match.
There are many speaking roles, among them a haughty countess portrayed by Isabelle Huppert. The countess’s wastrel stepson has adopted EO, impulsively. But life moves on, for EO and around him.
As co-writer Piaskowska said in a panel discussion sponsored by Deadline, once filming started the creative team “loved looking at the donkey so much that we basically cut the human parts more and more and more with every editing version.” The decision was a shrewd one. Even with its donkey POV sequences and flourishes (some more effective than others) such as EO’s single tear when he realizes how much he misses Kasandra, Skolimowski’s film succeeds because it’s essentially prose, not poetry — or something in between. The images of modern Europe, or at least Poland and Italy, reveal economic hardship and a welter of predators and victims, the hunters and the hunted, without amping up the melodramatics.
EO was played mainly by one donkey, with five backups for doubling. The director, now 84, regards his four-legged subject’s story the same way he regarded the plight of Polish immigrants, adrift in London, in his 1982 film “Moonlighting.” We are all at the mercy of our fellow creatures. Life is random, absurd, terrible, wonderful. Some creatures, Skolimowski says in the program notes for “EO,” are easier to direct than others. Donkeys, he says, “live to the fullest in the present moment. They never show narcissism. They do not skimp on the supposed intentions of their character, and never discuss their director’s vision. They are excellent actors.”
Just enough of that dry wit comes through “EO” to steer this project away from pure sentimentality. And the Sardinian donkeys used in the making of this shrewd, clear-eyed fable of modern Europe hold their close-ups and long shots like the true, charismatic animals they are.
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'EO'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
(In Polish, Italian, English, French and Spanish with English subtitles)
No rating (violence, language)
Running time: 1:26
How to watch: Now in theaters
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