There’s always at least one. Just a few nights deep into this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the competition has thrown up its first wild, batshit, and occasionally beautiful curiosity. Reimagining “Au Hazard Balthazar,” Robert Bresson’s classic fable of human cruelty and indifference for the present day, “Eo” follows a lowly circus donkey on a recurring series of captures and escapes, some more legible than others, some more hallucinogenic and experimental than others, but all combining into a singular surrealist whole. The great Isabelle Huppert takes top billing on the poster, but her existence seems to slip from the mind long before she appears on screen here. There is only one star of this show, and that’s the mule.
“Eo” was directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, a Polish filmmaker who came into this world all the way back in 1938, born in Warsaw just a year before the Nazis rolled through. He got his start in cinema in 1960, providing the script and acting in “Innocent Sorcerers” for Andrzej Wajda. He collaborated with Roman Polanski on “Knife in The Water” before moving to directing with a trilogy of films in which he played a disaffected version of himself. Many decades and many movies later, he had a cameo in “The Avengers.” All of which is to say that Jerzy Skolimowski has been around the block. “Eo” is his 18th feature, his first in seven years. Were it to be his last; it would be a fitting coda.
READ MORE: Cannes 2022 Preview: 25 Must-See Films To Watch
What looks like a thankless job on paper (Balthazar might not be the most sacred Bresson, but it is Bresson nonetheless) seems to click in Skolimowski’s hands and his screenwriter Ewa Piaskowska (the duo worked together before on “Essential Killing.“) Like the pious Bresson’s long-suffering protagonist, Skolimowski imbues his Christ-like equidae with New Testament allusions. Skolimowski peppers his film, and Eo’s journey, with moments of endearing generosity, a kind of catharsis earned through suffering. There is an affecting sequence where Eo meets a group of differently-abled children and plays for a while with them in the grass; and Skolimowski has it filmed without a whiff of irony, in sweet natural sunlight. Eo’s journey begins in a traveling circus, takes him through stately manors and small towns, down roads at a pace (in a shot that echoes Béla Tarr’s “The Turin Horse”), and through a forest that shimmers like a fairytale at night (in a fine visual flourish, Eo is surrounded in the woods by green lasers from hunters’ rifles.)
There is even a scene at a local football match where Eo, watching on intently, is taken in as a lucky charm by the victors before being beaten by skinheads from the opposing side—the banality of human tribalism. And Skolimowski casts a wide net. There are the more callous and systematic abusers: hunters, fur farmers, and the agriculture industry. There are everyday mistreatments, like the cruelty put upon animals trapped in circus life, or the indignity of being a prop for a fashion shoot. You’re reminded of the boy in “The Painted Bird,” or “Pinocchio” and “A.I.,” or even Ramin Bahrani’s “Plastic Bag”: a whole subgenre of innocents made to suffer for others’ sins.
It probably shouldn’t come as such a surprise to see a filmmaker of Skolimowski’s vintage and experience trying new things, but it’s hard not to feel a little thrill at the thought of the 85-year-old dreaming up some of these shots and camera moves (the cinematographer is Michael Dymek.) Skolimowski’s approach is formally audacious. His opening has a haunting beauty, from the slow fade to blood red of the opening titles to the hypnotic strobe as Eo and his handler, filmed from directly above, perform their act. Skolimowski turns that aesthetic into a recurring motif, reappearing throughout like a buried memory. He uses it again in a bravura ghosting shot that races downriver like something out of “Evil Dead”, landing on a wind farm and rotating at the same speed as the blades to give the effect of a world turning upside down. There are wonderful slow-motion sequences of horses in motion, their muscles flexing and relaxing mid-gallop. In the film’s most effective diversion, Eo even dreams of being a Boston Dynamics robot.
The humans get to have their moments. First, Eo’s handler Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), named for the woman who prophesied the fall of Rome, reenters the film on Eo’s birthday with a muffin before abandoning him again. Later, a long-haul truck driver (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) shares his food with a woman before meeting a grisly fate. It doesn’t all gel: the strings on Mirosław Koncewicz and Paweł Mykietyn’s score do a bit too much heavy lifting, some of the transitions are confusing, and the sequence featuring Huppert, involving a priest (Lorenzo Zurzolo) with a gambling problem, a hint of incest, and with no sightings of our hero, feels bizarrely bolted on.
Skolimowski’s time growing up in a country ravaged by war has informed his work for more than half a century and continues to do so. “Eo” is a joyful, experimental, and strangely moving piece of filmmaking that doesn’t always take itself seriously—yet it is nothing if not sincere. There is a sweetness to Skolimowski’s approach that takes little away from the impact or the fun—harm to the animals is only implied on the audio track, rather than relying on gratuitous simulation. It ends on a piece of text professing the team’s love for all animals (none, we are told, were hurt in the making.) Is Skolimowski vegan? It’s rude to ask, though you might not wish to eat cow for a little while after. You certainly won’t touch salami. [B]
Follow along with all our coverage from the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.