EO was one of the five nominees for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in March of 2023, losing to the incredibly overrated All Quiet on the Western Front, which was so obviously going to win that it deterred me a bit from seeing all of the nominated films. (I have one left of the five, Close, and still want to catch a couple of the other submissions from other countries.) EO is a bold film that has a very clear point of view and uses an unusual perspective to set it apart from just about anything else I’ve seen in the last few years, although it does meander at many points – like its protagonist – leading to some pacing issues that made me a little lower on the film as a viewer than I would be if I were a professional film critic. (You can watch it for free on Max or rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)
EO is the main character in the film, and he’s an ass – literally. He’s a donkey who is in a traveling circus when the film begins, but when the circus goes bankrupt, he’s packed up and sold, which leads to a whole series of adventures, some funny, many tragic, and eventually lead to violence both against him and against some of the humans and other animals he encounters. The woman who minded him at the circus finds the farm where he’s living after he’s been sold off, but their drunken encounter – she’s inebriated, not EO – leads the donkey to escape and wander of into the woods, which starts off as a sort of modern picaresque story until he runs into the wrong people and things begin to turn darker.
You can’t possibly watch this film and miss its message about how badly we treat the animals that we meet. It’s not your typical animal-rights screed, like all of the documentaries out there that aim to convince us to be vegetarians (which, to be clear, is fine if that’s your choice; I don’t eat cow or lamb any more, and that’s my choice) or otherwise shock and horrify us with how we mistreat animals we raise as food. EO takes a completely different tack, and it’s more powerful as a result. It focuses on a single animal, anthropomorphizing him by making him the main character and through some of the things that he does – pin that tail for a moment, please – so that we will see him more as an individual, sentient being with feelings who deserves more consideration than we give most animals who aren’t pets. There are at least a few people who see EO as at least worthy of some kindness, but he runs into more people who treat him like they might an inanimate object or, worse, a target for their anger or something for the slaughterhouse.
Unfortunately, the film overdoes the humanizing aspects of its main character, such as a scene where EO appears to be crying. The only animals that cry as a response to emotions are humans. Donkeys may feel basic emotions such as fear, joy, sadness, and so on, but they don’t cry, and it’s one of the ways in which EO lays it on a little too thick when it didn’t need to do so. There are some real scenes of emotion here, not just for EO but for us as the viewer; there’s a hunting scene, for example, where you can grasp EO’s fear through context, rather than, say, having the donkey turn to the camera and say “I’m scared.” (He does not actually do that in the film.)
There’s a whole history to EO that I don’t know, from its director Jerzy Skolimowski’s extensive filmography to its inspiration, Robert Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthazar, itself inspired by a passage on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. I haven’t seen or read any of those works, so perhaps I missed some of the context here and didn’t appreciate the way the film built on the earlier works. The cinematography is very strong, from close-ups of the six donkeys who played EO to some of the broader shots that create the perspective of EO as a smaller part of a larger scene. There’s also a short appearance by Isabelle Huppert that is somewhat ridiculous but, also, it’s Isabelle Huppert, still looking incredible at 71 and commanding every bit of her scene. (I still can’t figure out how that scene with her and her stepson fits into the larger whole without making a whole bunch of leaps of logic.) I do recommend EO and think it deserved its nomination – and was much better than the winning film – but some lapses in the execution keep it from reaching its full potential.