{"id":10309,"date":"2024-06-24T09:52:38","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T13:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10309"},"modified":"2024-06-24T09:52:39","modified_gmt":"2024-06-24T13:52:39","slug":"eo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/24\/eo\/","title":{"rendered":"EO."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

EO <\/em>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<\/em>, 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<\/em>, and still want to catch a couple of the other submissions from other countries.) EO <\/em>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\u2019ve seen in the last few years, although it does meander at many points \u2013 like its protagonist \u2013 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<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EO is the main character in the film, and he\u2019s an ass \u2013 literally. He\u2019s a donkey who is in a traveling circus when the film begins, but when the circus goes bankrupt, he\u2019s 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\u2019s living after he\u2019s been sold off, but their drunken encounter \u2013 she\u2019s inebriated, not EO \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t possibly watch this film and miss its message about how badly we treat the animals that we meet. It\u2019s 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\u2019s your choice; I don\u2019t eat cow or lamb any more, and that\u2019s my choice) or otherwise shock and horrify us with how we mistreat animals we raise as food. EO<\/em> takes a completely different tack, and it\u2019s 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 \u2013 pin that tail for a moment, please \u2013 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. Donkeys may feel basic emotions such as fear, joy, sadness, and so on, but they don\u2019t cry, and it\u2019s one of the ways in which EO<\/em> lays it on a little too thick when it didn\u2019t need to do so. There are some real scenes of emotion here, not just for EO but for us as the viewer; there\u2019s a hunting scene, for example, where you can grasp EO\u2019s fear through context, rather than, say, having the donkey turn to the camera and say \u201cI\u2019m scared.\u201d (He does not actually do that in the film.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a whole history to EO <\/em>that I don\u2019t know, from its director Jerzy Skolimowski\u2019s extensive filmography to its inspiration, Robert Bresson\u2019s Au Hazard Balthazar<\/em>, itself inspired by a passage on Dostoevsky\u2019s The Idiot<\/em>. I haven\u2019t seen or read any of those works, so perhaps I missed some of the context here and didn\u2019t 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\u2019s also a short appearance by Isabelle Huppert that is somewhat ridiculous but, also, it\u2019s Isabelle Huppert, still looking incredible at 71 and commanding every bit of her scene. (I still can\u2019t 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 <\/em>and think it deserved its nomination \u2013 and was much better than the winning film \u2013 but some lapses in the execution keep it from reaching its full potential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,1326,1074],"class_list":["post-10309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-movies","tag-2023-best-international-feature-nominees","tag-polish-films","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10310,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309\/revisions\/10310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}