Referring to Robert Bresson’s 1966 masterpiece Au Hazard Balthazar (another story about a donkey and a girl), Skolimowski makes Eo a witness to the accusation and indicts the human species.
EO is a story about cruelty towards nature and the brutality with which we ‘make the earth subject to ourselves’. Eo guides us through the successive circles of the hells we have created. He goes to a Polish district football match and is beaten by brutal fans; he is a guest at an animal clinic before being put on a transport to take him to an Italian slaughterhouse. Fate leads the film donkey along winding paths and makes us participants in his journey.
The cinematic Eo is not simply an animal protagonist. Skolimowski is not interested in his adventures but in the observations he makes as a traveller through the world of humans. The scenes Eo sees are recorded in the animal’s memory and in ours – they are moments of cruelty, of the mindless violence we are capable of, of a lack of empathy towards our ‘smaller brethren’. Skolimowski collects them one by one. As seen through Skolimowski’s eyes, man is a selfish, self-obsessed beast who enslaves animals, cuts down forests and builds the smoky factories that Eo passes during one of his transports. He reigns over the world but is incapable of caring for his fellow man (as in the great sequence about a likeable truck driver).
Skolimowski dresses his film in engagingly beautiful images. The cinematography by Michał Dymek, a young, eminently capable cinematographer, combines symbolic power with documentary observation. EO sometimes resembles a music video, at other times – an intimate documentary about an animal with a soul. Skolimowski’s picture is reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio’s documentary essays from the 1980s (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi) – in him, too, fascination with visuality is combined with a philosophical reflection on man and nature.
