Jerzy Skolimowski – Movie Musings

Skolimowski’s passionate call for animal rights is a modern Au Hasard Balthasar

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska (Kasandra), Tomasz Organek (Ziom), Lorenzo Zurzolo (Vito), Mateusz Kościukiewicz (Mateo), Isabelle Huppert (Countess)

You can make a lot of judgements on humanity, based on how it treats animals. EO, a poetic and deeply heartfelt film, makes a passionate plea for kindness and respect in our treatment of the natural world, qualities it all too often finds lacking. In that sense, it’s surprisingly different from its ancestor Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar. Where Bresson turned the rite-of-passage of a donkey into a Calvary-like journey, with the donkey a poetic substitute for Christ, Skolimowski’s film presents a donkey who is nothing more or less than a donkey, but whose experiences become universal for our treatment (and mistreatment) of animals.

We first meet EO as a circus performer, working closely performing tricks with Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). When the circus’ finances collapse, under the demands of animal rights activities EO is taken from his home and deposited in a sanctuary where he feels unsettled and uncertain. From there, his life becomes migratory as wanders encountering violent football hooligans, exploitative mink farmers and the odd decent person, progressing towards an abrupt fate that parallels Bresson’s Balthasar.

Even more so than Bresson’s work, Skolimowski’s EO front-and-centres its donkey star. Among many things, EO is a strikingly beautiful art film. The camerawork – shot by two DPs who pull the film together into a beautifully consistent visual style – is radiant, presenting a series of luscious 4:3 images which capture both the beauty of nature and the starkness of man’s presence in it. Several scenes are shot with a slightly frog-eyed lens, its blurred wet-looking edges suggesting EO-perspective POV shots. Skolimowski presents several sequences with a red-tinged dream-like quality, that suggests EO’s own day-dreams – soaring vistas, locations that visually merge together, flashes of his circus life. All this pushes EO himself into the film’s lead role, a real character.

But yet no attempt is made to anthropomorphise this animal. Although the camera lingers over EO’s face, his emotions are left entirely for us to interpret. In many ways, EO is a proof for that old editing test: show the same neutral face followed by a series of contrasting happy and sad events, and the mind will interpret that neutral face as holding different emotions. That is what EO does marvellously. Perhaps we just imagine EO’s joy at seeing Kasandra again (she is certainly moved – drunk, but moved). Perhaps his fear and discomfort in his new animal shelter home is us reading in what we might feel in his place. When EO kicks a mink battery farmer in the face, do we feel he’s angry because we are? There are no answers from EO: he’s just a donkey.

Nevertheless, he is a donkey on a journey and Skolimowski’s film is a surprisingly sharp-edged fable, deeply critical about our unthinking, brutal exploitation of animals. To too many of us, the film argues, their rights are not worth considering – they are dumb creatures good to work until they are too difficult to keep alive or we wish to use their bodies for something else, from clothing to food. EO’s encounters with humans invariably see him being used for their own needs, rarely considering what the desires of the donkey might be.

Skolimowski establishes from the film’s opening, with its animal rights activists who are (surprisingly considering the film itself is an act of animal rights activism) smug, self-righteous and so convinced they know what is best for EO that they are crucial in separating him from the only human in the film who cares for him. Far from ill-treated in the circus, it gives EO a home, love and a purpose. The instant he is removed from this circus, all three of these elements disappear from his life.

Not that Kasandra is an unequivocally positive influence in EO’s life. Settled onto a farm – again we read depression into his refusal to eat, although maybe EO’s just not hungry – EO’s new surroundings are not unpleasant (in fact, the farm seems to be partly about helping disabled children connect with animals, in a sweetly touching sequence). Kasandra gate-crashes one night, drunk, feeds EO a muffin and then disappears over the horizon. Her presence does enough to cause EO to follow her, escaping from his pen and walking out into the Polish countryside.

This pilgrimage through a forest and shooting range (laser guided hunters track wolves, EO at one point starring at a dying wolf, left to bleed out from the hunt), leads eventually to a village football game where EO’s braying causes one side to miss a crucial penalty. Suddenly EO is flotsam in a hooligan-tinged battle between rivals. The winners adopt him as a sort of comedy mascot, before forgetting him in their drunken haze. Hooligans from their rivals beat EO nearly to death, in a twisted act of revenge. EO has no say in either side of this war, merely becoming a passive and innocent war-ground that humans can exact their primal instincts on.

Treatment of animals is increasingly, cruelly, exposed. Nursed back to health by a vet (a worker at the hospital matter-of-factly asks why they don’t put EO down), he is sold to a mink farm that feels like nothing less than a brutal prison, where animals live in misery until their inevitable skinning to make a scarf. Trafficked across countries with horses, EO is again adopted by a stranger who uses him as a sounding board for his own concerns (this happens arguably three times: Kasandra arguably sees EO’s as a sentimental toy, a drunk unties EO before the fateful football ground because he wants his “friend” to be free and Vito uses him to stave off loneliness). This is as nothing compared to the film’s bleak ending – a terrifying view of the ruthlessness we push animals towards their fate.

EO is so masterful at front-and-centring the experience of an animal, and investing it with immense interpretative empathy, that it means the film actually drags when humans enter the frame. The film feels like it has to include scenes with humans in to bulk up it up to feature length (a better EO would surely be about 60 minutes long). A Polish truck-driver (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) playfully flirts before discovering man is just as inhuman to man as he is to animals. Vito and his mother-in-law, Isabelle Huppert’s countess, play out a small-scale human drama which seems trivial and uninteresting compared to the animal message that dominates the film.

Perhaps this is because EO succeeds so utterly in making us care and even (perhaps) understand the perspective of an animal. It’s a superb act of interpretative art – filmed with an astonishing visual beauty and with a gorgeous score of Pawel Mykietyn – and warm empathetic understanding. It also builds into a surprisingly moving and powerful message on the importance of treating animals with the same dignity and kindness that we would expect to be treated with ourselves. It makes for a thought-provoking and immersive film, that emerges successfully from the shadow of its forbear.

Brutal violence in London’s underbelly in Cronenberg’s formal and chilling dark fairytale

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Viggo Mortensen (Nikolai Luzhin), Naomi Watts (Anna Ivanova Khitrova), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Semyon), Vincent Cassel (Kirill Semyonovich), Sinead Cusack (Helen), Mina E Mina (Azim), Jerzy Skolimowski (Stepan Khitrov), Donald Sumpter (Inspector Yuri), Raza Jaffrey (Dr Aziz), Josef Altin (Ekrem), Tatiana Maslany (Tatiana’s voice)

Big promises shipped back to Russian villages, telling women about dreams they can make reality in the bright lights of London. Those are Eastern Promises – but the reality, of sexual slavery and abuse in Russian Mafia controlled houses is horrifyingly different. Set in an underbelly of London just under grand restaurants and red buses, Eastern Promises is a typically tough and bloody gangster fable from David Cronenberg, which plays out like a nightmare fairytale.

It’s the nightmare of midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts). When a pregnant Russian teenager dies giving birth, the only clue she has to who her daughter’s family might be is a Russian diary and a business card for a Russian restaurant. Anna – whose family are Russian immigrants – is offered help by grandfatherly restaurant owner Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Seymon is all pleasant insistence that he can help, even as asks after every detail of her life. Because Seymon is a ruthless Mafia kingpin, with a hapless son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) leaning on the emotional and practical support of his imposing, heavily tattooed driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). As Anna is pulled further and further into Semyon’s deadly world of death, could she have a surprising saviour?

Cronenberg’s film, sharply scripted by Steven Knight, is shot with a traditional stillness and a palette of strong colours – all of which reassuring visual language is utterly at odds with the skin-slashing violence at its heart. Eastern Promises opens with a Russian gangster practically having his head sawn off with a switchblade, in the hands of a mentally-handicapped nephew of a minor Turkish gangster. There isn’t a single gun in Eastern Promises – after all that would be breaking British law! – instead violence is meted out with the violent intimacy of a knife across the throat.

The film’s formal structure and framing – angles and cutting are kept simple, almost static – works brilliantly. As we watch throats slashed, grim sexual encounters or moments of imposing menace, the matter-of-fact presentation of these become more-and-more chilling. Eastern Promises feels like a bogey-man fable. Seymon’s restaurant – all class and bright red walls – an ogre’s cavern that leads us into an ever-grimmer world of violence and mayhem.

It’s a world Anna is unprepared for. Determined and resilient, Naomi Watts’ Anna is also undone by her politeness. How can she refuse an offer to help from someone as polite as Seymon? Watts does extremely well with a slightly under-written role, a woman on a quest who slowly realises how terrible the world she is peeking into is, but stop from trying to force through what she believes is right. Her disbelief – and out-of-place semi-innocence and sense of moral duty – make her stand out all the more in this terrible underbelly world, full of ogres and secret codes.

At the centre of is a monster. Armin Mueller-Stahl looks like your favourite uncle, but he quietly exudes cold, remorseless villainy. He’s the sort of man who delights in cooking the finest borsch, playfully teases his granddaughter’s violin playing and doesn’t bat an eyelid about ordering a rival to be dismembered. Mueller-Stahl is terrifying as this man the audience instinctively knows is dangerous and will stop at no moral boundaries to get what he wants (watch the steely eyed kindness he asks Anna where she works, lives and who she knows during their first meeting).

The obvious moral void in Seymon makes the unreadable Nikolai even more intriguing. Played with an extraordinary physical and linguistic commitment by Mortensen, Nikolai’s body is a tattooed walking advert of his past and capacity for violence and he’s the sort of relaxed heavy who is as unfussed with stubbing a cigarette out on his tongue as he is with snipping fingers off a corpse. Mortensen’s skill here is to make us constantly unsure where the moral lines are for Nikolai. He is a confirmed killer, but he takes an interest in Anna. Is this sexual or protective? What does he make of his bosses’ brutality towards women? What does he think of his direct superior Kirill?

Kirill is played with a larger-than-life weakness by Vincent Cassel in a thrilling performance that constantly shifts expectations. At first, he seems like a drunken blow-hard with a capacity for thoughtless violence. But Cassel makes clear he is a weak man with some principles, bullied by his father (to whom he is a constant disappointment), desperate to prove he is more capable than he is. He has an emotional reliance on Nikolai laced with sexual fascination (he can barely keep his hands off him).

Nikolai seems to accept this. But we don’t seem to know why. His actions are constantly open to interpretation. Ordered to have sex with a prostitute, he almost apologises to her after – left alone with her after Kirill has watched their sexual encounter, he’s strangely tender. He urges Anna to keep her distance but follows orders with calm disinterest. How far will he go? What moral qualms does he have, if any? Mortensen’s carefully judged performance is a master-class in inscrutability in a film that plays its cards very close to its chest as to why he (and others) do the things they do.

Cronenberg’s entire film is structured like this. Is the dragon a dragon or a potential knight? Can Anna emerge from this semi-Lynchian nightmare world and return to normal life – or will everything connected to her be destroyed by this world. Cronenberg’s study of this shady, heartless world is masterful. The “rules” and code of this brutal Russian Mafia world are excellently explored. And the film’s formal style culminates in a stunningly violent but beautiful (if that’s the right word) fight between a nude Mortensen and two knife-wielding Checians in a Turkish bath that is a brutal model for how these things can be done.

Eastern Promises resolves itself, after twists and turns, into something more comforting and traditional than you might expect. But is it a fairy tale ending to a nightmare? Either way, Cronenberg’s mix of formality and unflinching gore is masterful and in Mortensen it has a performance both relaxed and full of tightly-wound violence. Tough but essential.