You may not know Jerzy Skolimowski — he's an octogenarian Polish filmmaker — but his latest film EO is visionary and it has a rather unlikely star.
abc.net.au/news/eo-review-oscar-nominee-donkey-movie-jerzy-skolimowski/102180408Animal adventure as psychedelic dream, Oscar-nominated donkey tale EO is that rarest of things: a narrative film that actively decentres the human perspective in pursuit of a new way of seeing.
"Donkeys are known for stubbornness … carrots played an important part in the whole process," Skolimowski told Filmmaker Magazine. Though the film's obvious precedent is Robert Bresson's revered 1966 classic Au Hasard Balthazar, Skolimowski's version of the donkey odyssey is less a remake of that heavyweight text than its jazzy counterpart, a galaxy-brain take on the Frenchman's Christian parable that hoofs its way beyond morality and into altogether uncharted, agnostic terrain.
As EO passes through a bat-infested tunnel and, apparently, into another dimension, the camera spins 360 degrees to lashings of metal guitar, the image all dark silhouettes etched against iridescent lighting.
The director's haunting 1978 film The Shout saw him tap into the transformative power of sound, summoning a primal, magical force from beyond the frame.In EO, even the camera is detached from humanity, adopting the perspective of animals and machines, or swooping across a forest like a disembodied entity — the kind of formal daring conjured by another visionary, post-human work: Sandra Wollner's The Trouble With Being Born.