Eo has this thrilling aspect that Jerzy Skolimowski has always sought and found in his films, since his first traveling feature film, Distinguishing marks: none, in 1964. Cinema at full speed or with your legs around your neck. It is the “self-portrait of a man on the run” side, the portrait of the artist as a hunted beast: in Walkover (1965), we saw the author himself, as an absurd athlete, daredevil, jump on the screen from a moving train while he is being chased by a motorcycle, at the end of a long shot- sequence ; and Essential Killing (2010), with Vincent Gallo, was downright nothing more than a long hunt, chasing his enigmatic character, a mute terrorist chased by everyone like an animal, a film in pursuit of itself. It was the author as outsider – he who had become a wandering European filmmaker since his exile from Poland in 1968, following the censorship of his film Hands up.
Old cinema of humans
A thousand pieces of fleeing figures, still in almost human form. Here is thatEo deploys treasures of tracking shots, steadicams, tracking shots to follow the epic escape of a donkey who does just that: escape, and stay alive. The film flees with it from all sides, in all directions, in all colors, in a crazy plastic escape, sometimes comic, suddenly terrible, which only emerges from the imprints of its hero to present to us in touches, in small annotations, the surrounding absurdity of the old human cinema.
Making a film from the point of view of the donkey, what does that mean? Skolimowski recounts having met his character (“played” afterwards by six individuals) in the midst of the strange spectacle of a life-size Christmas crib. The donkey’s point of view on such a capital story is quite another theology, another anthropology. An iconology to rethink, to redo. In the film, rather than playing it stupidly anthropomorphic, it is a question – in order to manifest unequivocally, in the twists of the shots and the rhythm of their sequences, the affects of the donkey Eo – of seeking common ground with him. , a form of simple communication, which is obvious to the human spectator: where the emotion would shake the plans exactly as it shakes its equine hero.
In comparison to this evidence, full of jolts and movement, all human affairs and behavior, gentle or cruel with Eo, or even elsewhere (as in this very barge scene with Isabelle Huppert and Lorenzo Zurzolo, beyond the playful and free, above ground and blasphemous like a baleful parody of luxury world cinema), are an exhausted fiction. “No humans were harmed on the set of this film…” but the species takes it for its rank. In place, Eo appeals, it is its own farewell to language, to a cinema of the future: animal, not more elementary but more sophisticated than ever, and which would be a pure expression, by the physical means of cinema, of experience of space and time traversed by the urgency of living. A start, a call, hey ho!, in the direction of pleasure, of the present, hi-han!, time not completely wasted, which we have left and which we could still, at full speed, catch up with.