STAGE DIRECTIONS

[SCENE: CIRCUS. NIGHT. RED LIGHT.]

A donkey stands in a ring of red light. A woman kneels beside it. Her name is Kasandra. She holds its face. The light pulses. Music plays. The donkey is still.

The audience applauds. The act ends. The woman leads the donkey backstage. She touches its neck. She speaks to it. The donkey listens or does not listen. There is no way to know. There has never been a way to know, and Jerzy Skolimowski, who is eighty-four years old and has been making films for sixty years, does not pretend otherwise.

The donkey’s name is EO. It is a Polish onomatopoeia for the sound a donkey makes. In English: hee-haw. In the film: a sound that is sometimes comic, sometimes mournful, sometimes so raw it sounds less like an animal and more like a machine built to express a grief it does not understand.

EO is taken from the circus. Animal rights activists have intervened. Kasandra protests. She loves EO. EO may love her. The separation occurs. EO is loaded into a trailer.

The film begins.

[SCENE: STABLE. DAY.]

EO stands among horses. The horses are larger. The stable is clean. A woman brings feed. EO eats. EO stands. EO looks at the wall.

Skolimowski’s camera is at EO’s height. Not always, but often enough that you begin to experience the world from approximately three and a half feet above the ground. The world from this height is different. Faces are foreshortened. Legs and boots dominate. The sky is visible only when EO looks up, and EO does not often look up. The ground is where the information is: mud, hooves, concrete, grass, the shadow of a fence, the shadow of a person.

The film will follow EO through six countries. Through kindness and cruelty. Through landscapes that range from pastoral to industrial to nocturnal forest floor filmed in infrared, the trees glowing white against black like an X-ray of the world’s skeleton. EO will not choose any of these destinations. EO will be moved, transported, escaped, recaptured, handed off, abandoned. The journey is not a journey. It is a series of displacements, and each displacement reveals a human world that did not know it was being observed.

[SCENE: FIELD. AFTERNOON. WIND.]

EO walks. The grass is tall. The wind moves the grass around EO’s body.

Skolimowski and cinematographer Michał Dymek shoot this sequence with a drone, and the image is extraordinary: a small grey animal moving through a green field, seen from above, the wind creating waves in the grass that part around EO like water around a stone. The shot holds. The beauty is literal. It is not symbolic. It is not a metaphor for anything. It is a donkey in a field in the wind, and it is one of the most purely beautiful images in any film on this site.

This is what separates EO from its ancestor. Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, made in 1966, followed a donkey through a French village and used the donkey as a mirror for human cruelty, vanity, and occasional grace. Bresson’s style was austere, controlled, stripped of everything unnecessary. His donkey was a saint.

Skolimowski’s donkey is not a saint. Skolimowski’s donkey is a donkey. And Skolimowski’s style is the opposite of austere. EO is ecstatic. It is visually extravagant. It uses infrared photography, drone shots, strobing red light, handheld chaos, and a score that swings between electronic pulse and operatic grandeur. Bresson would have disapproved of every one of these choices. Skolimowski does not care. He is eighty-four. He has nothing to prove and no one to imitate. He made the film he wanted to make, and the film he wanted to make is one where a donkey walks through the world and the world is filmed as though seeing it for the first time.

[SCENE: FOREST. NIGHT. INFRARED.]

EO has escaped. Or been released. Or wandered away. The distinction is unclear. EO is in a forest at night.

The camera switches to infrared. The trees become white. The ground becomes grey. EO becomes a pale shape moving through a pale landscape. Insects are visible as bright points of light. A fox passes. An owl watches. The forest is alive with things that are not visible in daylight, and the infrared makes them visible, and the effect is that you are seeing the world the way another species sees it: not the donkey’s vision specifically, but a vision that is not human, a vision that does not prioritize what humans prioritize, a vision that finds the forest at night more interesting than anything that happens in a city.

Skolimowski holds these sequences long enough for them to change you. At first they are striking. Then they are beautiful. Then they are disorienting, because you realize you have been watching a forest through a nonhuman lens for several minutes and you have not wanted it to stop. You have been pulled out of your own perceptual habits and placed somewhere else, and the somewhere else is not unpleasant. It is just different. Radically, peacefully different.

[SCENE: FOOTBALL MATCH. NIGHT. FLOODLIGHTS.]

EO wanders near a stadium. A football match is underway. A local team wins. The fans celebrate. They see EO. They adopt EO as a mascot. They parade EO through the streets. EO is decorated, touched, cheered.

Later, the opposing team’s fans find EO. They beat EO. The shift from celebration to violence is not gradual. It is instantaneous, the way mob logic is instantaneous. One moment EO is a symbol of victory. The next, EO is a symbol of the enemy. The donkey has not changed. The humans have decided that what the donkey represents has changed, and the donkey pays the price for a representation it did not choose and cannot understand.

Skolimowski does not linger on the violence. He does not need to. The speed of the reversal is the point. How quickly affection becomes assault when the object of affection is not a person but a surface onto which people project meaning. EO cannot project meaning. EO cannot refuse meaning. EO is there, and that is enough for the world to do whatever the world wants.

[SCENE: FUR FARM. DAY. CAGES.]

EO passes a fur farm. The camera does not enter. It observes from EO’s path, at EO’s height. The cages are visible. The animals inside the cages are visible. No commentary is offered.

This is the film’s moral method. It does not argue. It does not editorialize. It places EO in proximity to the systems humans have built for animals, and it lets the proximity do the work. A stable. A circus. A fur farm. A truck carrying livestock. Each system is shown without judgment, and the absence of judgment is more devastating than any polemic, because it implies that the systems are so normal, so integrated into the landscape, that they do not require comment. They are simply there. The way the grass is there. The way the road is there.

[SCENE: MANSION. INTERIOR. NIGHT.]

EO arrives, through a chain of events too unlikely and too strange to summarize, at an Italian mansion. Isabelle Huppert is inside. She is having a conversation about family, inheritance, and the Church. She is in the film for approximately five minutes. Her presence is unexplained and inexplicable. She is Isabelle Huppert. She is in a room. A donkey is outside. The scene is played as naturalistic drama. It is also, somehow, one of the funniest things in the film, because the collision between Huppert’s intensity and EO’s indifference creates a gap that is pure absurdist comedy.

Skolimowski has always had this quality: a willingness to let the ridiculous and the profound share the same frame without choosing between them. EO is a film about animal suffering, about the indifference of human systems, about the beauty of the natural world, and also a film where Isabelle Huppert shows up for five minutes for no reason and a donkey watches a football match. It holds all of these things without strain.

[SCENE: ROAD. DAWN. FINAL MOVEMENT.]

EO is in a truck. The truck moves through grey landscape. The dawn is thin. Other trucks pass, carrying animals in the opposite direction, or the same direction. It does not matter. The system moves in all directions.

The film ends. Where it ends should not be revealed here, except to say that Skolimowski does not flinch, and the ending is earned by everything that came before it, and you will sit in silence afterward for longer than you expect.

[LIGHTS UP. HOUSE OPEN.]

There is no genre for EO. It is not an animal film, because animal films use animals to tell human stories, and EO does not tell a human story. It is not a road movie, because road movies require a destination, and EO has none. It is not a political film, though its implications are political. It is not experimental cinema, though its use of infrared, drones, and nonlinear structure is more formally daring than most films labeled experimental.

It is a film that follows a donkey and refuses to tell you what the donkey thinks. It refuses to anthropomorphize. It refuses to sentimentalize. It places a nonhuman creature at the center of a film and lets the creature’s passage through the world reveal everything the world would prefer not to show.

The stage directions end. The donkey does not take a bow. The donkey was never performing. The donkey was there. That was always enough.

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EO — Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Poland / Italy, 2022. 88 minutes.