Animal adventure as psychedelic dream, Oscar-nominated donkey tale EO is that rarest of things: a narrative film that actively decentres the human perspective in pursuit of a new way of seeing.
The eponymous star of Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski's other-worldly feature is a plaintive grey donkey whose deep, dark eyes might be read as either windows to the abyss or a reflection of the world in all of its wonder – sometimes both — as he wanders across a vision of Europe populated by farmers, football fans and French countesses, adrift on the tide of fate.
His journey begins in a Polish circus, where his only friend is a young showgirl, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), with whom he shares a gentle, almost psychic bond, depicted in a tender, red-lit tableau set to Paweł Mykietyn's baroque orchestral score.
Liberated from the circus after protests by animal activists, EO embarks on a picaresque adventure that's variously wondrous, mystifying, and sometimes traumatic.
His trek takes him from a horse stable and a seemingly friendly farm to a rowdy soccer match, a perilous encounter with meat traders, and even to the Italian enclave of a countess, played by no less than screen doyenne Isabelle Huppert.
Though the film's obvious precedent is Robert Bresson's revered 1966 classic Au Hasard Balthazar, Skolimowski's version of the donkey odyssey is less a remake of that heavyweight text than its jazzy counterpart, a galaxy-brain take on the Frenchman's Christian parable that hoofs its way beyond morality and into altogether uncharted, agnostic terrain.
The film collapses arbitrary boundaries between nature and technology, imagining a world in which all creatures — donkeys, robotic dogs, Isabelle Huppert — are imbued with an equivalent degree of consciousness.
In the film's dazzling centrepiece, EO wanders into a forest glade that's like Bambi by way of Twin Peaks, an astral traveller amid the frogs, spiders, owls and wolves.
Skolimowski and his cinematographer, Michał Dymek, strobe the woods with emerald green lasers, beamed out from the gun sights of hunters but looking for all the world like an invitation to a pagan rave.
As EO passes through a bat-infested tunnel and, apparently, into another dimension, the camera spins 360 degrees to lashings of metal guitar, the image all dark silhouettes etched against iridescent lighting.
Later, the camera, low to the ground, rides shotgun with a Boston Dynamics robot dog, a random passer-by that's afforded a miraculous sequence: quizzically regarding its own reflection in the light of a street lamp, rolling in the grass like a terrier, its little metallic paw extended toward the moon.
In these and other sequences, Skolimowski evokes an animistic world where even flashing police lights, a junkyard wrecking crane, or a soccer ball, appears possessed of a soul, where humans are simply another life form sharing this plane of existence.
It's a remarkably radical work from the 84-year-old veteran, though not inconsistent with his stridently avant-garde career.
From his early work in the Polish new wave through his films made in exile (the eerie, psychosexual, coming-of-age drama Deep End) and his recent experiments (minimalist chase thriller Essential Killing, the time-bending 11 Minutes), Skolimowski has always had a knack for conjuring the unusual.
The director's haunting 1978 film The Shout saw him tap into the transformative power of sound, summoning a primal, magical force from beyond the frame.
In EO, even the camera is detached from humanity, adopting the perspective of animals and machines, or swooping across a forest like a disembodied entity — the kind of formal daring conjured by another visionary, post-human work: Sandra Wollner's The Trouble With Being Born.
The film is not so much about seeing the world through EO's eyes (though there are plenty of distorted-lens moments of donkey vision), nor does it set out to humanise him or the film's other non-human characters — to give them humanity would be patronising — and sentiment is in short supply here.
The film's humans aren't even especially cruel or evil, although they sometimes can be insensitive and boorish. Rather, they're just as clueless as everything else, pawns in the ebb and flow of the universe.
The film doesn't moralise or pass judgement. Things simply are.
Even when EO, tagging along with a herd of cattle bound for the slaughterhouse, unknowingly heads toward what appears to be his ultimate exit, the moment seems less a grand statement about the preciousness of all life than an acknowledgement of the matter-of-factness of existence, the routine churn of fate.
Somewhere — maybe in that spooky, spectral forest glade — life goes on.
EO is in cinemas now.
