Tight angles on an animal and a female body are paced with the solemn gravity of a requiem by a unison of cellos and double basses. Brasses chime in setting a cadenced crosstalk of scarlet reds and pitch blacks. Is it a brutal killing, we might find ourselves thinking, or an avant-guard show. The circus.
Only minutes earlier, it was the gloomy end of a day that winter seemed to have claimed back after a delusive stint of spring. I had switched off too late to catch a film I desperately wanted to see, but I still needed to cleanse. Having domestic arrangements already been made to allow one of my recursive cinephile escapades, I bought a ticket for another film that wasn’t really on my list. So there I was, with a cup of coffee in my hands whose impossible temperature wasn’t showing any sign of dropping by the fraction of a degree and my heart sank into the abyss of one of the most fascinating films I have seen this year.
A few months after his debut feature was released, a young and unknown Jerzy Skolimowski got a phone call from Paris. To his complete disbelief Cahiers du cinéma wanted to interview him, why me? Despite having hardly been screened outside of Poland, Walkover had made it into their year top ten. The second place. Skolimowski froze for a good ten seconds, perhaps more, then he said, ‘And who is in the first place?’ It was Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar. Not having been able to see it yet, he asked if they could wait a couple days so he could go and watch it. To this day the experience is vivid in his mind. At some point during the film, the somehow cynical stance of the fresh filmmaker eager to learn the craft dissolved and by the excruciating epilogue, the beautiful scene where Balthazar dies in a mountain pasture surrounded by a flock of sheep, he was in tears. The first and only time in his life he really cried for a film. When a few years ago he and his co-writer, producer, and other half Ewa Piaskowska made with 11 Minutes their first attempt at a different way to break the received cinematic narrative, they knew they hadn’t quite succeeded. So as they felt the urge to continue the exploration, the memory of the effect that Bresson’s provocative masterpiece had had resurfaced, seemingly offering the right place to start all over.
Although their research in the equidae literature reached as far as Ovid and Apuleius to find a voice that wasn’t just an echo of Bresson’s, the comparison with Balthazar not only feels natural, it leads to a deeper appreciation of the work done on its Polish heir. As a donkey, the former does donkey things. He might have a vague cognition of the human world, but he is essentially an innocent observer. Much of the empathic connection with the audience comes right from its inability to understand our nonsensical torments. A different creature altogether, Eo is a couple of Darwinian steps ahead to say the least. Ambiguously courting a vague sense of parody, very soon in the film we see him cry or watch melancholically a herd of horses running free in the prairie. Later on, he will perceive the meanness of man and even revolt, seek revenge, make friends. Whereas Bresson’s donkey is some sort of a furry Virgil who takes us through the deep circles of our nature embodying the same elliptical attitude of its auteur’s cinematographic language, Skolimowski uses Eo to make a series of clear statements on the aberrations of our times. But there’s a more profound difference. Bresson’s models are sheer fascinating mysteries in the way they behave and the decisions they make. Skolimowski instead, judgmentally visit themes that are as valid as obvious, and he does writing characters who ultimately struggle to reach any of the complexity they seem to strive for. Hooligans, priests, and torturers. Eo is populated by a parade of foil figures whose inherent explicitness adds hardly anything to the established debate on the respective matters.
And yet, despite its latently weak foundations Eo develops a surprisingly solid structure and a shape of its own that gets frame after frame more convincing, more personal, more exhilarating. Bresson’s near documentary visuals couldn’t be farther from the expressionist spectacle Skolimowski puts on, a visual symphony that is drenched with experimental ambitions without ever seeming pretentious or daring for the sake of it. Conversely, Eo shows the maturity of an artist and his confidence in letting the show be steered, admittedly for the first time to this extent in his career, by the creative genius of his collaborators. Polish composer Paweł Mykietyn writes a superb score that goes far beyond the traditional concept of soundtrack. The entire film is arguably conceived as an immersive musical experience. Cinematographer Michal Dymek talked about a synergistic clash between his more pragmatic approach and Skolimowski’s free jazz process. More than a few are the scenes that still make me wonder where and how did they come from. After Eo is savagely beaten by a group of demented football supporters, we cut to a strange tracking shot of a quadrupedal robot clumsily walking in the dark on a dried field, to eventually stop in front of a perfectly flat reflecting surface. Further into our donkey’s epic, we are drawn into another striking, near mystical night shot on a skier, the snow ahead hardly lit by a head-torch, and the image flipped in post.
Now, whoever criticised or didn’t quite respond to it has no doubt a point, though what remains aside from any subjective position is that Eo provides an extraordinary sensorial trip that is substantially different when seen on the big screen. Especially in a time where the audiences are barricading themselves into smaller spaces, a film like this claims back the importance o the physical place and defines the art. Lucky me to have bumped into it by chance, as is anyone who saw it in a cinema. Because theirs only is the privilege and the joy to have been reminded what cinema itself is about.
