Loving "EO"

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 "EO", which is I assume a phonetic title based on the sound a donkey makes, is a film about a donkey. The donkey does not do much. It is a donkey. It walks around the forests of Poland some, it gets contorted or exploited by the many humans it runs across (some kind, or at least with kind intent, but many not), and then it meets its end. To what extent an 80 odd minute abstract piece of cinema from Poland can become any kind of an international success, I have no idea, but Jerzy Skolimowski's bit of animal rights activism is one of the better films I've seen this year.

 I say that without claiming to understand it all too well! To me, "EO" is beautiful in its simplicity. This is a rugged tale of nature, with its only excess coming in its trippy camerawork and baffling techno music score. The camerawork adds nice flourishes throughout - this is either a film with some very slick CGI or some very impressive drones pulling off the sweeping shots of landscapes, color filters are liberally applied, and a group of green lasers in a night scene look particularly stunning. Skolimowski uses a full stable of lenses to see the world though an animal's perspective. Kind of like the high frame rate in "Avatar", here's an air quote gimmick that feels totally normal once your brain gets used to it after a few minutes. The music is... abrasive on purpose, which is either going to excite people for being unexpected or turn them off for lacking the same grounded realism as the rest of the film. I was all for it. Ultimately any bells and whistles that add to the experience of being jostled around by other people outside of your control are adding to the story here.

 I'm not crazy about every single thing going on. I don't know what, if anything, this film was trying to say about Polish society. The overly dramatic and provocative scenes with humans, such as a truck stop murder or Isabelle Huppert fighting with her pastor son, failed to add much for me. But I'm not sure how much that matters - this is fundamentally a film about respecting animals and the natural world, and that it shines in depicting the natural world more than the human one isn't a "flaw" so much as it is a direction. I liked "EO" a lot, and think people should try to seek it out in the maybe ten cities actually playing it. 

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