As a film directly inspired by Au Hasard Balthazar, this one is similarly about the travails of a donkey. This time the setting is modern day Poland and while it has won a slew of accolades, I believe it is by far the lesser film. While the original was largely about the suffering of life in general, this one is focused on the harm that mankind inflicts on animals. Not only is that somewhat trite but it does so by throwing EO the donkey into a series of misadventures that are more or less random and improbable. It experiments with colors and stylistic effects but overall I’m not impressed.

We first see EO as a donkey performing as part of an act in a circus with a girl Kasandra who genuinely cares for him. However animal activists shut the circus down and EO is sold. He is first taken to a stable where the horses are well cared for and occasionally let loose to run free while he is put to work. One day he knocks over a shelf of trophies and is sent to a smaller farm. It apparently caters to tourists and we see him playing with autistic children and giving them rides. However EO appears to be depressed by the disruption and is reluctant to eat. One evening, Kasandra arrives to visit him, offering him his favorite carrot muffin for his birthday, but she is unable to stay. That night, he knocks down a wooden fence to go after her. He soon gets lost in the woods and is menaced by wolves. Before he is attacked, unseen human hunters with laser scopes shoot the wolves. He watches a wolf die in front of him and is able to leave peacefully. Wandering into a town, he is caught by the local fire department but after being freed becomes unwittingly involved in a football game. After his braying causes a distraction, he is celebrated as a mascot by the winning team and their supporters and taken to their party.

EO’s trials go on from that point and they’re mostly for the worse. At one point, the film switches to footage of one of the robot dogs that should be familiar to most of us now, showing it falling down and struggling to get back up. I get that it’s supposed to represent EO as the filmmakers don’t want to show a real live donkey being badly injured. Sometimes we see human problems that have nothing to do with EO, such as a truck driver trying to offer food then take advantage of a migrant woman. Mostly however the theme is that EO keeps finding himself in situations where animals are kept by humans. Some are obviously terrible including what looks like a farm that harvests the fur from foxes. But I don’t get what’s so bad about being assigned to interact with children or even to cart around hay for horses. It’s sad that he doesn’t get to be with his favorite human but I’m not sure if there’s an interesting wider lesson to be drawn from that.

Au Hasard Balthazar was a grimly effective film because however much the audience identified with the donkey, Bresson never lost sight of the fact that in the end it is still a donkey. Here Jerzy Skolimowski does the opposite, inserting scenes to show that EO misses Kasandra and thinks of her. He has been anthropomorphized so much that he seemingly knocks over the horses’ trophies out of resentment and empathize with other animals that are exploited by humans. It’s the same lazy approach used in so many films with animal protagonist and completely misses the point of its inspiration. One observation I have 21st century Poland is a kinder, richer place that the squalid setting of the original. A donkey found wandering on his own has a reasonable chance of being kindly treated by passersby or government services as this film acknowledges. So Skolimowski contrives to put him in implausible and unusual situations to make him suffer while losing any sense that it’s about a specific time and place.

I’m very disappointed that this won as much acclaim as it did as I feel that it is mostly undeserved. There’s nothing particularly interesting in having a donkey as a protagonist so it’s really just a case of doing it because the earlier, famous film did it this way. Most of all, it’s a poor use of the concept because it should really be about the donkey being a passive observer of human affairs instead of a main character. Just disappointing on multiple levels.