Producers: Jerzy Skolimowski and Ewa Paiskowska   Director: Jerzy Skolimowski   Screenplay: Ewa Paiskowska and Jerzy Skolimowski   Cast: Sandra Dryzmalska, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzulo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Tomasz Organek, Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako    Distributor: Janus Films/Sideshow

Grade: B+

There are plenty of human actors in Jerzy Skolimowski’s film—including French icon Isabelle Huppert, playing an ill-tempered countess—but they’re all doing support work for the title character, a donkey whose odyssey reveals the relationship, occasionally kind but often cruel or indifferent, between people and animals.  Loosely inspired by Robert Bresson’s “Au hazard, Balthasar” (1966) but forging a path of its own, ”EO” manages to be both a homage to Bresson’s film and a compelling new take on its trajectory. 

When EO (played by six animals—Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako) is introduced, it’s in a hallucinatory sequence bathed in red light.  It’s revealed that the donkey, called after its braying sound, is part of a circus routine in tandem with pretty Kasandra (Sandra Dryzmalska), who treats her partner kindly.  But EO’s also employed as a beast of burden by the circus, hauling refuse to a nearby junkyard.  The dual role is ended, though, when the circus is closed down—the result, it appears, of both financial difficulties and protests from animal rights’ activists.

EO is summarily relocated to a horse ranch, where the donkey, now just a beast of burden, watches the steeds pampered and well fed, and then after what might be either an accident or a sign of displeasure over unequal treatment, to a farm that also serves incidentally as a children’s zoo.  But then EO departs on an episodic adventure, surviving a forest full of hunters but falling afoul of hooligans who hold the beast’s braying the cause of their loss in a soccer game.  After stints in an animal hospital and a fur farm, EO is picked up by a truck driver (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) transporting horses to an unknown destination; that episode ends in violence, with EO falling in with a young man (Lorenzo Zurzolo).  He takes the donkey home to a palatial estate where it’s revealed that the man is an exiled priest seeking a reunion with his imperious stepmother (Huppert), with whom he shared an apparently amorous past.  But EO does not remain there: off again, the donkey winds up with a herd of cows in a location that will not be revealed here.

A degree of anthropomorphism is probably unavoidable in a film like this—we’re occasionally treated to flashes of EO’s memories, for instance, and on a couple of occasions EO practically does an eye roll when knocking over a trophy case at the horse ranch or clobbering a brutal overseer at the fur farm—but this is no cutesy Disney portrait.  One has to read feelings into the frequent focus on the animal’s face rather than having them telegraphed to you explicitly, though the contexts in which Skolimowski situates them necessarily affects the interpretation.

And those settings are often striking, enhanced by the extraordinary cinematography of Mychal Dymek (with additional footage shot by Pawel Edelman and Michal Englert).  While most of the film is relatively naturalistic, an image of EO crossing a bridge against the backdrop of a waterfall is like a museum painting, and the forest sequence, shot through with red lasers from the hunters’ rifles and the noise of scurrying foxes, has a hallucinatory quality.  Elsewhere the film goes a surrealistic route: when the donkey is beaten, he turns into a robotic metal skeleton thrashing about bathed in red light.  And there are overhead shots from far above as the donkey trots through fields and along roads—as if a God’s-eye POV.

The humans whom EO encounters are an eclectic bunch.  Dryzmalska’s is certainly the character who empathies most with the animal, and is recalled with what appears to be affection, but the actress also invests her with a flightiness that overcomes the circus performer’s concern for her former partner.  The trucker played by Kościukiewicz gets a mini-drama all his own in which EO acts merely as an observer of human folly, while Zurzolo and Huppert enact an elliptical domestic drama that suggests deep undercurrents; no wonder the donkey elects to leave it hanging.  Miroslaw Koncewicz’s production design showcases cannily chosen backdrops for all the episodes, which have been been stitched together smoothly by editor Agnieszka Glińska.  Pawel Mykietyn’s score is evocative but spare and understated.

It takes courage to attempt a new take on a film many regard as a classic; it’s a challenge Skolimowski has embraced to remarkable effect.            

Producers: Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral   Director: Alice Diop    Screenplay: Alice Diop, Amrita David and Marie NDiaye   Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Canterella, Salimata Kamate, Thomas de Pourquery, Charlotte Clamens and Adama Diallo Tamba   Distributor: Neon

Grade: B+

A 2015 trial that became a tabloid sensation in France—of Fabienne Kabou, a well-educated student from Senegal who nonetheless suggested that sorcery might have impelled her actions in the death of her infant daughter—is treated with an austerity that’s the very opposite of sensationalism in Alice Diop’s provocative semi-fictionalization.  Diop, a documentarian who is herself an immigrant from Senegal, attended Kabou’s trial in Saint-Omer, and while Rama (Kayije Kagame), the writer who observes the judicial proceeding against Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) in the film is not her, she nonetheless acts as the director’s surrogate, and to a certain extent ours.

In a brief prologue, Cody is shown depositing Elise on a beach along the Channel in northern France, in the expectation that the tide will come in and drown the child.  Rama, a professor of literature and novelist working on a modern version of the Medea legend, decides to attend the trial.  Similarities quickly emerge between the two.  Rama’s partner Adrian (Thomas de Pourquery) is a white Frenchman; the father of Coly’s daughter was Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), a much older local artist with whom she lived for years.  Both women have had strained relations with their mothers—we see as much in flashbacks to Rama’s dynamic with her mother (Adama Diallo Tamba), and observe the attitude of Coly’s mother Odile (Salimata Kamate) directly, since she’s prominent in the courtroom and befriends Rama on walks back to their hotels.  Rama is also pregnant, which increases her empathy with Coly, which grows more pronounced as the days pass.

But except back in her room, where she expresses her emotions as thoughts and memories assail her, Rama retains a cool, collected posture as the trial proceeds.  The details of the case emerge through testimony delivered by witnesses under questioning from the judge (Valérie Dréville), an active participant in the French judicial system based on Roman law, and the who barristers, one for the defense (Aurélia Petit) and the other for the prosecution (Robert Canterella), who are often perplexed, even annoyed, by the unemotional directness of Coly’s responses and her seeming inability to explain her actions (she even expresses the hope that the trial will explain them to her).  Yet the self-serving remarks of Dumontet, a craven character who tries to portray himself in a good light without much success, and of one of Coly’s professors (Charlotte Clamens), who expresses surprise that Coly, with her background, should have chosen Wittgenstein as a thesis subject, suggest a barely suppressed sense of superiority and condescension with racial and cultural overtones.

“Saint Omer” is hardly a typical, Hollywood-style courtroom drama, as one might intuit from the mention of Wittgenstein, otherwise unexplained, and of Coly’s offhanded remark that she is a Cartesian, also without further elaboration.  And by the close the crime of which Coly is accused is nearly forgotten, replaced by an overriding concern for the victimization of immigrant women, and indeed of all women, that the defense barrister emphasizes in her summation, pointedly presented directly to the camera, a tactic through which we are all challenged to reach a judgment ourselves.

That impassioned monologue looks back to the start of the film, the lecture delivered by Rama to her class before she travels to Saint-Omer. Her topic was Marguerite Duras’ screenplay for “Hiroshima, mon amour,” accompanied by news footage of women believed to have consorted with Nazi soldiers during the occupation shaved and paraded through the streets as a means of public shaming. The juxtaposition might seem to some a bit of a stretch, but it certainly makes Diop’s point.

Diop even withholds the usual satisfaction of hearing a verdict announced.  Rather this is a film that has been constructed to put viewers in the same position in which Diop found herself in 2015—coming to terms with what might have led a mother to commit an inexplicable act.  Some will undoubtedly find this frustrating, but it’s an audacious artistic choice, and overall one successfully played out.

The film is expertly made.  Diop’s calm, reflective style, which treats silences and pauses with as much, if not more, importance as the monologues, gives ample opportunity to the cast to make the characters breathe despite their general reticence and control.  Kagame and Malanda are both quietly compelling, their glances toward one another carrying unspoken power, and the entire supporting cast contribute to the atmosphere of complexity and hidden undercurrents, with Maly particularly unsettling as a weak, duplicitous man straining nervously to justify his crass conduct.  Shot largely in the locations where events unfolded—including the courtroom—the film has air of somehow elevated authenticity, accentuated by Anna Le Mouel’s unadorned production design and Claire Mathon’s serene, unobtrusive cinematography; the measured editing by Amrita David complements Diop’s ruminative approach.

A fact-based courtroom drama that upends the genre’s usual histrionics, Diop’s film is artistically inspired as well as inspired by an unspeakable act.