A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, August 30, 2025

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)

Sandra Drzymalska in EO

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Tomasz Organek, Mateus Kosciukiewicz, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Isabelle Huppert, Lolita Chammah, Agata Sasinowska, Anna Rokita, Michal Przybyslawski, Gloria Iradukunda, Piotr Szaja. Screenplay: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski. Cinematography: Michal Dymek. Production design: Roberta Amodio, Miroslaw Koncewicz. Film editing: Agnieszka Glinska. Music: Pawel Mikyetin. 

"I don't know whether I'm stealing you or saving you," a character says to the titular donkey of Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, which pretty much sums up the moral conundrum of a film in which no good deed goes unpunished. The animal rights activists who succeed in shutting down the circus in which Eo has performed only leave the donkey adrift in a world strange to him. Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska) thinks she's being kind to Eo when she seeks him out and visits him after the circus closes, but she only awakens his desire to follow her, which he does at his peril. The vet who heals him instead of euthanizing him after he's beaten nearly to death only postpones the inevitable. And Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), who is the one who either steals or saves him, leads the animal further astray in his odyssey. The film could be interpreted as an indictment of cruelty to animals, but the humans in it are perhaps even crueler to one another. As a fable, EO is tangled in ambiguities and tinged with nihilism, unlike the film to which it's an homage, Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), in which the donkey is a suffering saint. No one is redeemed by Eo's fate, so it's better to see it as an expression of Skolimowski's vision, tenuous and complex and unresolved as most visions are, full of images that haunt and tantalize. 


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