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Anyone who cried at Bambi might flinch at the prospect of seeing a film about life from the point of view of a donkey. You know it’s not going to all be a bed of roses. But new film EO (yes, like Eyeore, the sort of bray a donkey makes) has won over critics.
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“Far from being a cavalcade of misery, EO is
a thrillingly imaginative piece of filmmaking: a strange, haunting epic about a
donkey that couldn't feel more of our moment,” raves John Powers at NPR.
The Sideshow & Janus
Films production won the jury prize at Cannes this year, and
is Poland’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar.
Marshall Shaffer at Slant says, “The film’s poetic use of
image and sound to align the audience with a donkey’s perspective is a triumph
of artistry and empathy alike.”
Venerable critic Amy Taubin thinks EO is one of
the greatest films she’s ever seen but then she also includes French director
Robert Bresson’s austere masterpiece about the drudgery of a donkey, Au Hasard, Balthazar, in her top five films of all
time.
Seeing, Au Hasard, Balthazar in 1966 was a pivotal
moment for the director of EO, Jerzy Skolimowski.
“I was mostly watching the film with a slightly cynical
professional attitude to learn how it was done,” Skolimowski tells IndieWire.
“When the film ended, I found out I had tears in my eyes.”
He realized that the donkey’s experiences, which take some
tragic turns, were uninhibited by the artifice of human performance. “That was
the biggest lesson I ever got from a filmmaker,” Skolimowski said. “The animal
character can actually move the audience stronger than any actor.”
It took the director until now to get around to making his
donkey movie though – and it wasn’t a slam dunk that a donkey was the animal of
choice either.
Skolimowski and his wife Ewa Piaskowska, the film’s
coproducer and co-writer, explain how the project came about to Shaffer.
“We decided that we should try to make a film about
something that really touches our hearts and minds in a direct way. Something
that we would like to protest. We [discovered] that the only cause that was
really moving us emotionally was the fate of nature and animals. And that is
how we got close to the decision to offer the main part to an animal performer,
and we chose the donkey.”
There was something about the eyes of this particular animal
that spoke to the filmmakers.
“It was all in the eyes,” Skolimowski tells Deadline. “We
were struck by the look of the donkey’s eyes … enormously large with this very
specific melancholic look.” They realized that the same shots set from the POV
of the animal would reinterpret the situation, making everyday objects and
situations anew.
Skolimowski tells Taubin that a donkey somehow shared the
attitude of an observer who doesn’t participate but with his presence alone
makes a comment. “His eyes rarely moved
from one object to another. He was like a camera placed for a master shot. He
sees everything but doesn’t point out any details as being important. He is
just there. We both felt that this is the animal who could be the lens of the
future film.”
From IndieWire we learn that Skolimowski cast six donkeys of
the same breed for the part of EO and followed the same filmmaking pattern for
each scene: He began with a master shot before gradually moving in for closeups
of the donkey’s face, followed by a point-of-view shot.
While his crew was setting up various camera angles or
taking breaks, Skolimowski would spend time whispering into the donkey’s ears,
which replaced the usual process of coaching an actor in between scenes. “We
managed to create a kind of bond which, for my private use, I called
‘co-existence,” he said.
The director told Matthew Jacobs at Vanity Fair that a
little more than half of what we see EO do was pre-planned, while “maybe 40% or
35%” was improvised. “It’s an exercise in perceiving people as animals through
the donkey’s eyes,” Piaskowska says. “The animal itself has these connotations:
the beast of burden and its benevolence. It’s an absolutely innocent being.”
Largely due to Covid related issues (the film was shot over
26 months, with some stoppages reaching six months), EO has directors of
photography, Michael Englert, Michal Dymek, and Pawel Edelman.
They experimented with a wide angle lens, to approximate a
donkey’s field of vision “but it was just uncomfortable to look it and it would
have tired the audience, and it really didn’t bring us closer to the experience
of the donkey,” he relates to Shaffer.
Skolimowski is a veteran of the Polish New Wave who trained
under Andrzej Wajda and co-wrote Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water.
His father was executed by the Nazis and he himself grew up in the
repressiveness of Communist Poland. Marvel fans may know him from his memorable
role as weapons dealer Georgi
Luchkov in 2012’s The Avengers. He’s now 84 but directing with all the
verve of a Pulp Fiction-era Tarantino.
This panache is on display everywhere in EO, says
Powers, “with its onrushing camera, color filters, aggressive music and utter
confidence about throwing viewers into the donkey world where there's more
poetry than plot and nobody explains what's going on.”
It would be interesting – or possibly just too devasting –
to programme EO back to back with Andrea Arnold’s cow’s eye view of life and
death, Cow, from 2021, or Pig the 2021 Nicolas Cage cult hit –
another heart string tugger.
This particular humble animal comes with more baggage than
just Bresson’s classic film, none of which was lost on the filmmakers. As
related to Vanity Fair they thought of Apuleius, the ancient Roman philosopher
who accidentally turns himself into a donkey. They thought of the eponymous
donkey from Platero and I, a Spanish poem by Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón
Jiménez. They thought of Don Quixote’s squire performing heroic deeds on a
donkey’s back, Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem, and even gloomy Eeyore
from Winnie-the-Pooh.
In recent months there’s been two other awards contenders
featuring donkeys. The Banshees of Inisherin cast Colin Farrell’s dairy
farmer alongside his pet donkey Jenny. In class satire Triangle of Sadness,
a group of rich travelers marooned on an island painstakingly kill one to
survive. All of which leads Vanity Fair to wonder if 2022 is not the Year of
the Ass.
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