→ June 24, 2024
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EO.

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.

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→ January 17, 2020
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Corpus Christi.

This week’s Academy Award nominations didn’t include many surprises anywhere – at least, not if you assume the worst of the Academy – and many categories already seem like their winners are locks, including Parasite as the Best International Feature Film, which would make it the first South Korean winner of that award (it’s already the first nominee). Three of the other nominees were widely expected – Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, which also landed a Best Actor nod for Antonio Banderas; the acclaimed Honeyland, which doubled up with a nod for Best Documentary Feature; and the French entry, Les Misérables, which isn’t based on the novel, and won the Prix du Jury at Cannes last May.

There was one surprise in the category, however – the Polish entry, Corpus Christi, which was at least less widely-known or reviewed than some of the other submissions, but is an absolute stunner of a story, one that manages to pack substantial themes into a modest plot. Powered by an incredible lead performance by Bartosz Bielenia as Daniel, a paroled convict who wants to enter the priesthood but is told by the prison chaplain that no seminary will accept a convicted felon. When he arrives at his assigned job at a sawmill in a small town on the other side of Poland, a chance encounter with Marta, a girl he seems to want to impress, leads him to pretend to be the new priest temporarily assigned to the village while their main priest is away.

It turns out that his timing is fortuitous for the town, as they’re still reeling from a tragedy that took the lives of seven people and that has created a rift between the families of the victims, with recriminations mostly headed towards one widow whose husband is blamed for the accident and who has been ostracized and targeted as a result. Daniel, meanwhile, fully embraces his role as priest, at first borrowing some ideas from the prison chaplain’s sermons but quickly finding his own voice, expressing his own faith with elements of Jesus’s secular philosophy, a little bit of primal scream therapy, and a powerful ability to connect with people that he didn’t even know he had.

There are points in Mateusz Pacewicz’s script where it feels like we might be heading down familiar territory – maybe this is the time when Daniel gets caught, or maybe the town experiences a spiritual awakening thanks to Daniel and everyone is redeemed. Nothing is that simple, not in the plot as a whole, and not in the subplots like that of the accident or the role of the power-hungry mayor (who owns the sawmill). Daniel’s character is rich and complex, and his transformations reflect a more basic truth about how environments affect people’s ability to change or simply to let their better selves show through. The townsfolk themselves are also well-drawn, and at times inscrutable, closing ranks even when they know they’re wrong, happy to mouth the words in church but not to live it even when Daniel reminds them of the messages of Christ’s love for mankind or of the need to forgive. The script delivers so many powerful scenes, but the one where the victims’ family members are confronted with the hate mail they sent the widow particularly stands out for its impact and how Daniel and Eliza stand in the face of such animosity.

Bielenia’s performance drives this film, and had anyone actually seen this in 2019 – if the film had been in English – he would have been more than deserving of nominations and awards for what he does for Daniel. He’s capable of grand emotions, including the rage he shows in some of the scenes in prison, but his performance is at its most powerful when he slows everything down, even when that’s an indicator that Daniel is in a bit over his head and trying to draw upon his faith to choose the right words or actions. He’s a more effective priest for his inexperience, as his sermons are more authentic, but those scenes had the potential to become trite if overplayed by the actor; Bielenia shows a restraint throughout the film, even when Daniel is confronted with threats to his secret and to his person, that makes the performance more credible and more compelling.

Director Jan Komasa particularly nails the landing of Corpus Christi, which ends in mostly unexpected fashion, including multiple shots of Daniel as he exits the church for the last time or in the final shot of the film. It’s ultimately an uplifting story, but rich with the complexity of actual people who are trying to reconcile their unspeakable grief with their faith, and who default to their baser instincts in a failed attempt to cope with their rage. Parasite is going to win the Oscar, but if the nomination gets more people to watch Corpus Christi when it’s released in the U.S. next month, so much the better. It deserves a wider audience than it might otherwise have gotten.

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→ January 24, 2019
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Cold War.

Pawel Pawlikowski won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015 for his movie Ida, and returned this year with the critically acclaimed Cold War, distributed by amazon studios, which just earned three Oscar nominations this week for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and, in one of the biggest surprises of the nominations, Best Director. The taut 85-minute, black-and-white drama sets a doomed romance against the backdrop of the Cold War itself, with its two main characters moving back and forth across the Iron Curtain as the political climate tears them apart and their animal magnetism pulls them back together.

Based heavily on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents, who were musicians in Poland after World War II and split up multiple times before Pawe? was born, Cold War stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, who first meet when Wiktor helps put together a music ensemble to play and honor traditional Polish folk music under the Communist government. Zula has singing talent but lies about her background and experience to con her way into the group, and Wiktor feels an immediate attraction to her that she recognizes and exploits to secure her place at the makeshift academy. This eventually explodes into a passionate affair that leads Wiktor to plan for their defection while their company tours Berlin, only to have Zula choose to stay behind at the last moment, setting in motion a series of meetings and partings over the next fifteen years between Paris, Yugoslavia, and Warsaw, with Zula becoming a jazz singer, Wiktor ending up a political prisoner, and the two absorbing increasing costs to leave each other and come together again.

The pain of parting may be nothing to the joy of meeting again, but Zula and Wiktor are unable to maintain that joy for very long, and begin to tear each other apart – especially Wiktor, who seems to often treat Zula like a prize to be won, or an object to be possessed, as opposed to an independent woman with her own agency. Kulig and Kot have absurd on-screen chemistry that allows Pawlikowski to show virtually nothing while making the desperate passion between the two characters palpable: There’s one love scene where the camera and the actors pause, and we only see Zula’s face, and in the span of under ten seconds the viewer can feel the intensity of this relationship while still understanding that it can never end well.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white appears to have resonated with Academy voters, as both this and Roma landed cinematography nods; Pawlikowski said that color didn’t work when they tried it, as he wanted to replicate the gray bleakness of Poland in the aftermath of the war and the communist takeover. It gives the Polish scenes that depressing air, although it works against the portions of the movie in the nightclubs and salons and ateliers of Paris, where the sense of life is muted … or perhaps that was Pawlikowski’s point, that Zula and Wiktor, as products of the war and the communist regime, can’t fully appreciate or embrace the artistic and personal freedom of the west after their experiences?

Kulig smolders as Zula, moving deftly from ingenue to partner to free spirit to an independent woman who can be petulant and indignant as Wiktor begins to treat her worse the more they’re together. Kot, looking like a slightly older, more rakish Michael Fassbender, drifts more abruptly from dark remove to desperation, as Wiktor’s ability to take Zula for granted once she’s there is completely mystifying, while his single-minded focus on finding her when they’re apart is palpable and easier to understand.

Cold War is short – it’s less than half the length of fellow nominee Never Look Away, which clocks in at 188 minutes – and it zips along once Zula enters the picture, sometimes a little too quickly for some of the tension between the two characters to develop naturally. The film’s ending is problematic, although the last line and shot are both beautiful, in a way I can’t discuss without a huge spoiler; I’ll just say I don’t think it’s adequately set up by the 80 minutes that come before. That puts it behind my big 3 of foreign films from 2018 (Burning, Roma, Shoplifters), but the first 95% of this movie is so good and such a gripping depiction of the familiar story of star-crossed lovers that it’s still a success and worth seeking out.

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