LGM Film Club, Part 409: EO

……I totally forgot about the debate when I initially scheduled it. I pulled it for a couple of hours. My apologies to all.

I have become lazy as I’ve gotten older. I’ve let things slide. I already apologized for the lack of Music Notes last weekend and have pledged to do better. But I’ve also led the Film Club slide, which is stupid because it would take me 2 seconds to throw something up, or 10 minutes maybe.

The irony of this is that for the first time in my life, I’ve actually kept track of all the movies I’ve seen this year, which is presently at 123. That’s a lot! One reason for this of course is that I don’t watch TV. My entire TV watching in 2024 has been 2/3 of the way through a rewatch of Deadwood and the first two seasons of The Bear, which I did like though I heard the third season struggles after the show fell in love with itself, or so I understand. Anyway, as a general rule, I’d rather spend 2 hours with sharply drawn characters than 10 hours with poorly written characters and bloated storylines.

Well, in any case, there’s no reason not to get back to this and we will start with the film Manohla Dargis called her best of 2022, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO. This is the story of a donkey. There’s been something of an uptick in films told from an animal’s perspective in recent years and it’s an interesting way to create a film. I do have to state up front–this is most definitely not the best film of 2022. It’s not a bad film, but it has real weaknesses. One thing that these films can do is elicit strong responses from people based on their sentimental feelings about animals. So they can be more than a little manipulative because people’s emotions about some animals are often very easily manipulated.

There are some very good parts of to the film. It follows this somewhat naughty donkey from its time in a circus through what very well may be the end of his life. One of my favorite bits is that he gets separated from the circus by animal rights activists who close the thing down. And sure, a lot of animals are abused in circuses. But is there a plan to actually do anything with these animals? No, not really. Now it turns out our friend ends up on a farm, but he likes to escape, thus the naughtiness but also creates a film. Some people treat the donkey well, others try to kill it after it interferes in a local soccer match.

The problem, such as it is, comes from the often undisciplined Skolimowski. Why did we need a random scene with a robot dog that had nothing to do with the donkey? There’s several scenes that are somewhat gratuitous in this sense. The donkey also largely disappears from the film in the last 15 minutes, as Isabelle Huppert randomly shows up and it becomes an angry family movie for awhile. That said, Skolimowski does a great job demonstrating the life of an innocent animal in a pretty horrible world because humans are pretty horrible. This ain’t no Disney movie.

I’d give it a 6/10. It’s a solid film and worth your time, but don’t listen to Dargis on this.