Eo

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

Running time: 1hr26 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo

Every year at the Cannes Film Festival, there will be at least one film that is the film of the festival, in a very particular sense. I don’t mean it’s necessarily the best film of the festival, or that it is sure to win the Palme d’Or. It’s that particular, distinctive film that comes to mind when you look back, in the future, and try to remember what played at any given edition of the festival. 2022 is the Year of the Donkey, and when I try to remember what played at Cannes this year, the film that will instantly leap to mind is Eo, Jerzy Skolimowski’s riff on Robert Bresson’s classic donkey biopic (eeyorpic?) Au Hasard Balthazar. 

The star of Eo is a donkey called Eo, and the film follows his choppy journey from circus to… well, that would be telling. It belongs to the tradition of storytelling that includes books like Black Beauty, which boast a non-human protagonist, and where we stick closely to the perspective of that protagonist throughout. It’s not a fantasy or a metaphor like Watership Down or Animal Farm, but a literal exercise in assuming the point of view of one of our four-legged friends. Of course, in its own way, it is still a fantasy, because it invites a certain level of projection on the part of the viewer. The restrictions imposed by a protagonist that can’t speak create a challenge for the filmmaker, and one that the veteran Polish director rises to, filling this gap with a cinema of pure imagery, of sensory experiences and almost gothic tableaux, as Eo encounters mostly fairly terrible examples of human-kind, few of whom are equipped with much in the way of empathy for Eo’s plight. 

Credit must also go to his editor Agnieszka Glinska, who has form in this field (she also cut Valdimar Jóhannsson’s excellent Lamb), and who keep things brisk and pacy — this is certainly one of those films where one could have too much of a good thing, but at 86 minutes, you’re never less than engaged. Glinska is re-teaming here with DoP Michal Dymek: the pair also shot and cut Film of the Week fave Sweat. It’s striking to realise how much in common that film, with it’s arms-length, dispassionate perspective on the self-commodification of influencer culture, has in common with Eo, which is also something of a parable about understanding a living creature largely in terms of their free-market value, as a commodity. Not that I’m comparing influencers to donkeys, you understand.

A title card at the end of the film explains that the film was made as a commentary on man’s cruelty to animals and it certainly fulfils the brief: you’ll come out of it very much #TeamDonkey and feeling throughly ashamed of humanity. Of course, if this is too depressing, you can always take solace in the fact that it also takes human beings to make a movie like this, so perhaps we’re not as bad as all that.

EO (2022) Written by Marie Kreutzer | Shot by Michal Dymek | Edited by Agnieszka Glinska

Selected for the Competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival