EO

EO Review: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Poetic Reworking of Au Hasard Balthazar

EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO feels wrested from urgent dreams, as if the veteran Polish filmmaker is dramatizing the fragments that he remembers of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. Though their narratives are similar, the films oppose one another: Au Hasard Balthazar has a controlled, tamped-down beauty that builds to an ending of profound catharsis, while EO is lurid and overheated with emotion, before gradually cooling off to arrive at the tough matter-of-factness that informs Bresson’s film from the outset. It’s as if Skolimowski is offering a primer on how one evolves into a transcendentalist. Or if EO has been conceived as the intemperate grandchild of a cinematic milestone.

Both films follow a donkey who experiences the trials and beauty of life while traveling the countryside and meeting humans of variable character. From the opening frames, Skolimowski starkly differentiates his film from the purity of Bresson’s, shooting his donkey, called EO, in close contact with a young woman, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). Both are bathed in red strobe lights, which characterizes the intimacy of their touch as more than vaguely sexual. In certain images, you’re not exactly sure what you’re seeing, until it’s revealed that EO and Kasandra are part of a Polish circus act. Kasandra seems to love EO, treating him as an equal, until they’re separated by a perverse irony: Animal rights activists protest the enslavement of the circus animals, understandably but without understanding EO’s bond with Kasandra.

Or is there a bond, at least a two-way one? Like Au Hasard Balthazar, EO is driven by the nagging ambiguity of our relationships with animals. Do they love us or are they weathering our presence out of shrewdness or indifference? Both interpretations sound egocentric—a marginalizing of our mysterious relationships with animals—as we’re barely able to empathize with each other much less members of another species. Like Balthazar, EO can mean anything or nothing; each can stand in for transcendence, cosmic indifference, or both or neither. Skolimowski is acutely aware of Au Hasard Balthazar’s sense of emotional negative space.

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EO is even tougher than Au Hasard Balthazar in one fashion. Where Balthazar is sentimentally accorded Christ-like stature, EO continues to go about his day. This film’s ending is more troubling, more in line with the lives of working-class humans: After several adventures, EO returns to a place of rules and constriction, having learned perhaps nothing despite experiencing a spectrum of love and hate. One day He will die and that will be it. Not seeing him die is a relief, especially for viewers bringing Au Hasard Balthazar into the room with them, but this elision also leaves us hanging. Perhaps we needed another donkey sacrifice to lend us closure, a sense of order, though Skolimowski pointedly denies this of his audience.

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EO’s humans are mostly abstractions. Kasandra shines for her kindness, while a countess played by Isabelle Huppert is memorable, not really in a good way, for seeming to belong to an entirely different film, perhaps a softcore step-MILF fantasy rather than a rumination on a transcendentalist milestone. It’s EO that lingers—his grace, his strength—as well as the intoxicating images that Skolimowski and cinematographer Michal Dymek build around him. The filmmakers create a modern equivalent to the magical realism that seemed to float through the great run of European art films of the 1940s through the 1970s, not only the films of Bresson, but of Dreyer, Bergman, Polanski, Cocteau, and Buñuel, among many others. Skolimowski imbues this magic with a punk-rock charge that’s all his own.

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Certain images here have a scrappy found intensity, such as traveling shots of EO walking among the dystopia of a junkyard, while others embody enraptured despair, like a moment of EO standing on a bridge passing by a vast waterfall that suggests oblivion. Skolimowski is very attentive to the notion of capturing the donkey’s view of things, going so far as to imply that the animal has daydreams, as in a beguiling sequence where the camera floats above the countryside, surveying the hills and trees and wind turbines. And, in a moment of brutal surrealism after EO is beaten, he’s daringly imagined as a robot animal crawling along the ground. These images seem to symbolize the unmooring sense of disembodiment that violence can foster in a victim. All these sequences are united by Pawel Mykietyn’s music, a kind of swooning techno opera that bridges classicism with grunge.

It’s easy to image the self-important homage that a film as revered as Au Hasard Balthazar could encourage. In this light, one of EO’s great accomplishments is one of simple yet desperate earnestness. The film suggests a vision that the 84-year-old Skolimowski had to get it off his chest before retirement or death. Seemingly freed of plot and expectation, EO is driven, above all else, by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.

Score: 
 Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Tomasz Organek, Lolita Chammah, Agata Sasinowska, Anna Rokita, Michal Przybyslawski, Gloria Iradukunda  Director: Jerzy Skolimowski  Screenwriter: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski  Distributor: Janus Films  Running Time: 86 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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