Their names are Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela.
Six donkeys playing a single one in the film: "EO".
Like the sound he makes.
In German: I-ah.
Jerzy Skolimowski's film tells the passion story of this donkey.
Isabelle Huppert, who plays a small role, also fades away next to him.
Skolimowski, who wrote the screenplay for Polanski's "Das Messer im Wasser" (1962) and received a golden bear at the Berlinale in 1967 for "Der Start", wants to try something really new again at the age of 84.
Peter Korte
Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.
Follow I follow
"EO" is unthinkable without Robert Bresson's "Au hasard Balthazar" ("For example Balthasar", 1966).
Since that film he has never shed a tear in the cinema, Skolimowski said.
Unlike Bresson, he tries much harder to look at events through the eyes of the animal, a pretty gray Sardinian donkey.
This is of course not to be taken literally, because nobody knows how the world and people appear to a donkey.
But the anthropocentric view can be avoided.
Like Janis Rafa, for example, who succeeded two years ago in her film “Kala azar”, which is about Greek undertakers and shows what is happening from the point of view of a stray dog.
But is a circus donkey dreaming of the girl with whom he is performing tricks?
Does he look enviously at a white horse in the neighboring box that a film team is waiting for while the donkey has to pull a wagon with props?
Of course, Skolimowski doesn't want to give any answers;
however, it brings about moments in which one habitually projects feelings such as sympathy or envy onto the animal and at the same time becomes aware of this projection through the way the situation is presented.
Birthday carrot muffin
EO trots through nature.
A stream, a fox, a badger, a frog in close-up, a wolf howls.
The camera hovers.
Then an almost psychedelic red light.
The irritation, the shift in meaning, arises from the fact that one constantly asks oneself: From whose perspective is the story being told, whose view represents what we see?
Pity for the circus animal soon follows, because there is not only the friendly Kasandra, but also a bearded man with a whip;
because EO is no better off than animal rights activists come, the circus has to close and the animals are impounded.
As a workhorse, EO is allowed to pose with a carrot wreath at the opening of a farm.
He doesn't want to join the other donkeys on a farm where children with Down's syndrome are learning how to handle animals.
He prefers to stand alone at the fence and lets himself be comforted when his Kasandra brings him a carrot muffin for his birthday.
And he's off.
This is going to be a strange journey through rural Poland.
He stands next to a wind turbine, sees a bird fall.
Follows a football game, after which first the winners take him to the pub and then the losing team almost beats him to death with baseball bats - "with three hooves in the afterlife" is what the animal clinic says.
Again and again one wants to connect what has been seen, the views from the truck or at the tormentors, with assumptions about inner sensitivities.
Why is he calling one moment, why is he silent the other?
When he is transported to Italy in a truck, does he suspect that someone wants to spoil him?
Why is he following the young man who picks him up at the motorway service station?
Because he speaks kindly to him, apologizes for all the donkey salami he's eaten in his life?
Like Bresson, EO doesn't end well.
But it would be wrong to say that EO is stoic about its fate;
just as the everyday talk that donkeys are stupid, stubborn, headstrong or stubborn means nothing;
or the parable of Buridan's donkey, which suggests that a donkey must starve if it stands between two identical-looking haystacks because it cannot decide.
Above all, Skolimowski's film opens up one possibility: to follow a non-human protagonist through an action without being able to read from his facial expressions and gestures how he experiences it.
He experiences violence, friendliness, affection, indifference.
If he were a human being, he would be assigned motives, feelings, an attitude towards the world.
How EO makes sense of the world remains a mystery.
Skolimowski leaves it at the speculation that even a donkey longs for the person who was good to him.
EO is one of the most mysterious heroes in cinema history.