Jerzy/Joe Skolimowski’s attempt to redefine art ends in nihilism.
Is Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s acclaimed donkey movie, EO, really a remake of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), by French director Robert Bresson? Or, as is more likely, is it a nihilist spin-off of Winnie-the-Pooh and its shy donkey hero, Eeyore?
The inordinate critical praise for EO after it won a Cannes festival prize reveals film culture’s current desperation. As prestige films flop and theater chains close, some reviewers, nostalgic for the heroic age of moviegoing, pretend that EO is art.
This delusion only makes sense as the degraded expression of the Biden age. Cultural history is sacrificed for new marketing. To imagine that a mimeographed donkey movie is “Bressonian” goes along with the recent redefinition of “infrastructure,” “inflation,” “woman,” and political principles.
So Skolimowski, at age 84, redefines Bresson’s legacy. When I finally saw Bresson’s hallowed Balthazar, I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t so much a movie about a donkey, but it was Bresson’s most sensuous film — almost polymorphous in using the creature as a metaphor for the dumb-animal, sexually based, morally conflicted human interactions to which it and we hold witness. Bresson offered spiritual insight; Skolimowski caters to some shadow art/political conceits as if he were the Joe Biden of movies (but without the stumble-bum gaffes).
Jerzy/Joe Skolimowski observes the world at a remove — not through a donkey’s point of view, but using the donkey (first repossessed from his circus caretaker, then in the custody of random owners) as a catalyst for mankind’s perfidy.
EO, a lonely soul without agency, is shown among other suffering animals, a camel, field horses in slo-mo, a caged mongoose. In EO’s world, humans are just another species in the cosmos subject to vile, neurotic, carnivorous whims. The human characters — truck driver Mateo (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), a haughty countess (Isabelle Huppert), and a wealthy rebel (Lorenzo Zurzolo) — make brief appearances before submitting to dark fate. A sudden throat-slashing complements Skolimowski’s images of natural splendor: a picturesque bridge and dam waters moving in reverse.
In this era when art movies are expected to be ideological, the point is to justify and sentimentalize social treachery. That’s why Jerzy/Joe Skolimowski follows EO, the beast of burden, through a crumbling, depraved Europe (from Poland to Italy) toward the film’s ecology-minded, plant-based finale. The new world order, seen through the eyes of a dumb beast, is a Great Reset fable.
In Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore’s sadness was a psychological projection of Christopher Robin’s boyhood awakening to life and experience (an idea stolen for Pixar’s Inside Out). Today’s sophisticates ignore the power and purpose of such moral clarity, whether in Winnie-the-Pooh, Balthazar, or Spielberg’s War Horse, which used an animal for its profound, insistently beautiful allegory of love’s different manifestations even during wartime.
When critics prefer EO to those precedents, it tells us the culture is decaying. Jacques Demy’s moral fairy tale Donkey Skin is forgotten, and Caroline Vignal’s ingenious cinematic tribute film My Donkey, My Lover & I is also dismissed. The plaudits given EO continue the rejection of our cultural heritage — particularly disregarding (replacing) the Christian allegory of Bresson’s masterpiece. Now that prestige art movies are either gross or failing at the box office, EO shows us that film culture is going through a jaded second childhood.
