EO

Here's that International Feature contender I promised.

This would be EO, Poland's entry into the Oscar race. This is a remake, sort of, of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (Balthazar at Random), helmed by one of Bresson's contemporaries, 84-year-old Jerzy Skolimowski. What can you expect out of it? A weird sampling of sadness in a tight 88-minute package.

So, who is EO? As with the earlier Balthazar, EO is a donkey. EO starts the film as a circus animal trained by the kindly Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). EO and the other animals are confiscated when the circus is foreclosed. EO finds himself on a farm or two. He eventually escapes to try to find Kasandra. He finds himself in a petting zoo, a horse stable, a fur farm, a junkyard and even a countess's (Isabelle Huppert) estate. He even finds himself the accidental mascot of a soccer team. It doesn't end well.

EO lacks an internal monologue for its titular character. Instead, Skolimowski and cinematographer Michael Dymek let EO's adventures speak for themselves. We get a few chuckles from EO's ignorance, such as his disinterest in his stint as a beer garden mascot. But we recoil when EO witnesses, and is subjected to, man's cruelty. Take the soccer episode, for example. "His team's" victory party is crashed by sore loser hooligans who take their rage out on him. He finds himself on the fur farm after rehab. All the scared foxes in cages will make you reconsider investing in fur. Don't get me started on the time he meets a wolf. He soon wanders into the one place he shouldn't be. Let me reiterate. It doesn't end well.

The weirdness comes in when we get his POV. His POV scenes are surreal sequences filtered in nightmarish red. The film gets us going with one such sequence during a circus act. The weirdest part of all comes when he wanders after the hooligan attack in the form of a robot dog. The surreality is compounded by Paweł Mykietyn's imposing score. On a positive note, the film's unfiltered views of the Polish countryside are stunning, and editor Agnieszka Glińska does a good job disguising the fact that EO is actually six different donkeys (Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako).

What about the humans? Drzymalska is likable as Kasandra, which gets our hopes up in seeing them reunited. The soccer team that "adopts" EO are likable, too. You'll hate the opposing hooligans with a passion when their screentime is done. There's also a trucker (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) who gets a bit of a subplot before he's randomly murdered. Perhaps the most significant mini-subplot belongs to the countess and her nephew, Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo). You'll also find it the oddest when it's done.

I think you can tell by now that this isn't a happy movie. Overall, EO is a sad film about an animal's experiences with cruelty before his life, and the film, abruptly end. But we are spared from seeing the worst of it all other than the trucker's murder. But we hear it. I won't blame you if you seek something else. As for me, while I promised that this would be the last of this year's slate I'll look at, I'm suddenly inclined to check out Living. Despite its $19.99 rental tag. 

Tick tock, tick tock.