Two from Jerzy Skolimowski

I’ve been watching Skolimowski’s stuff since last year’s Io was so wonderful and because I’ve never seen any of his work. Moonlighting (1982), however… is not great. It feels like it’s tied down and is never going to get anywhere. And then it sort of just doesn’t. To make matters worse, the central character is very difficult. He’s nervous the whole time, but he’s sort of impossible to identify with because of how Skolimowski tells his story. I found Deep End and Rysopis much more successful than this movie.

Deep End (released in the US in 1971) is fun, and then the ending is not fun, but it has some gorgeous shots in it. 

Identification Marks: None (1965)

Jerzy Skolimowski's Rysopis (Identification Marks: None) is an astounding 1960s film about malaise in contemporary Poland. This movie was released in Poland in 1964/1965 and the U.S. in 1968. I think what's so fascinating is that I just saw Ivan Ostrochovský's 2020 film Servants – a film that's also about 1960s Poland (and includes a scene in front of a military board that cites Skolimowski's film specifically) – but Identification Marks: None is so, so, so much better, despite being obviously made on a shoestring budget and without a cameraman half the time. This is a really stunning film. I have known nothing about Skolimowski until 2022's Io, but now (thankfully) every streaming service I get is showing Skolimowski movies, so I can watch a few.

Identification Marks: None is showing exclusively on MUBI.

Oscar Nominations 2022: 6 of 9

This year's nominees:

Argentina, 1985

1 Nomination

• International Film: Argentina (Wild Tales, The Secret in Their Eyes, The Son of the Bride, Tango, The Official Story, Camila, Truce)

Director: Santiago Mitre

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Peter Lanzani, Santiago Armas Estevarena, Alejandra Flechner, Gina Mastronicola, Jorge Varas, Laura Paredes

I was into this. I know it's mostly a procedural courtroom type thing, but I didn't mind. I liked it a lot. It felt exciting to me to learn this much about fascism and the guerra sucia in Argentina. I knew a lot about it already, but this was satisfying in lots of ways, and I thought it was very well acted. Unlike many of the international nominees, this film is on Amazon Prime, and so it is easily accessible. I will say I am a bit surprised that this got nominated over the many other possibilities that were submitted by various countries – especially Mexico's Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Venezuela's The Box, and France's Saint Omer. It's good, but all of those are better. Still, it's a fair choice, and the Academy loves Ricardo Darín.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #24 out of 67

Io (Eo)

1 Nomination

• International Film: Poland (Corpus Christi, Cold War, Ida, In Darkness, Katyń, Man of Iron, The Young Girls of Wilko, Nights and Days, The Deluge, Promised Land, Pharaoh, Knife in the Water)

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Lorenzo Zurzulo, Isabelle Huppert, Andrzej Szeremeta

This was my favorite movie of the year. I've written about it already here, so I won't say too much more about it, but it really blew me away. I think my favorite part of how this film works is the way that it asks us to think about things from the perspective of the non-human... and that the film tries to do this cinematically and not just narratively. This isn't Homeward Bound or something like that. This is a film that treats the world as a violent, awesome place but that also asks what the role of animals is in this world that we have made. It's an awesome film, and I love it. It's now streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #1 out of 67

An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl)

1 Nomination

• International Film: Ireland

Director: Colm Bairéad

Cast: Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Michael Patric, Kate Nic Chonaonaigh, Joan Sheehy, Tara Faughnan, Neans Nic Dhonncha, Carolyn Bracken

This movie is not playing anywhere near me, and I have no way to see it. I am very annoyed about this. Somehow I have managed to see eleven of the ninety-three films submitted in the International Feature category, and yet this film that made the shortlist and then got lucky enough to be nominated is only playing in a few select cities. This is especially dumb because right now is the time when interest has to be the highest for this film. It should be in way more cities. Once Oscar night rolls around on March 12, no one is going to care about this movie. (This happened last year, for example to Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom). All that to say, I have no idea if this movie is good or not. It is the only one of the nominees that I won't be able to see before Oscar Sunday. I'm salty, obviously.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Unranked

Close

1 Nomination

• International Film: Belgium (The Broken Circle Breakdown, Bullhead, Everybody's Famous, Farinelli: il Castrato, Daens, The Music Teacher, Paix sur les Champs)

Director: Lukas Dhont

Cast: Eden Dambrine, Gustav De Waele, Émilie Dequenne, Léa Drucker, Kevin Janssens, Igor van Dessel, Marc Weiss, Léon Bataille

I had a feeling from the trailer that this was going to be one of my favorite films of the year, and I waited and waited and waited for it to be in a theatre near me. When it finally got here I made sure to go to the movie by myself because I knew I was going to be a sobbing mess. All of my predictions were right, although I didn't actually know what this movie was going to be about, and how it works is actually rather surprising. Close is about two boys who are like brothers, physically close and intimate with one another in the most beautiful, extraordinarily loving way. They're both beautifully acted, too, and so you fall in love with them as an audience... and you fall in love with their relationship. We see them first in the sort of edenic throes of their affection, and then the two go off to school. What they meet there is homophobia, suspicion, and hostility: the school is a place of hostile masculinity and demands that they account for their relationship. They are bullied as sissies and weaklings, and the movie studies the boys and their responses to this very closely. I will say no more about this movie, but it absolutely broke my heart, and, like Lukas Dhont's last movie, this one is a finely crafted portrait of young people dealing with emotions for which they have few words and even fewer coping mechanisms. Close carefully sets up its scenario, and it's deeply felt and wonderfully humane.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #12 out of 67

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Elvis

2. The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

3. Avatar: the Way of Water, Triangle of Sadness, The Whale, and Babylon

4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun

5. To Leslie, Blonde, Glass Onion, and Causeway

More posts coming soon:

7. Animated Features

8. Animated Shorts

9. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman

I'd love it if you checked out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!

Eo (2022)

I have really flipped for Jerzy Skolimowsksi's Eo. This is a film about a donkey who works in a circus and an odyssey that takes the donkey from the Polish circus through a range of experiences. It's deeply moving, and I fell in love with it. Eo is quite obviously based on or a retelling of Robert Bresson's wonderful Au Hasard Balthazar, but Skolimowski's film is designed as a kind of portrait of modern humanity that feels deeply unnerving and sometimes confusing if frequently beautiful. Eo contains these amazing interludes – occasionally lit red – in which we watch the world upside down or backwards, or we watch a robot dog hunt something. Skolimowski is insisting that we look at the world differently, that we don't settle into complacent ideas about the world's beauty or the purity of animals or clichés like this. He is using film to ask us to see differently, to unsettle our typical ways of watching and thinking. 

Eo is a film about our relationships with animals, the complete unimportance of our very high melodramas from their perspective, and our total disregard for animal welfare. It's fascinating and beautiful and totally compelling, and Skolimowski's writing is impeccable.

One note on the title. I really don't understand why the distributors changed the title to EO instead of the original Io, and I absolutely do not understand the commitment to capitalizing it – I am equally baffled by people who keep writing TÁR, too. These are names. The donkey is called Io (pronounced eee-oh because we're in Poland), and the Todd Field film is named after its main character, Lydia Tár. The caps make no sense. This isn't CODA. Part of Eo/Io takes place in Italy, as well, where Io, of course, means I – the implication being that the donkey is all of us... 

But more importantly Io is a classical reference that I would expect many people to get. Jupiter's moon Io is even named after the mythical figure! Io was a mortal woman, beloved by Zeus, who was transformed into a cow. To my mind, the resonance here is unmistakable. Skolimowski is asking us to look at this donkey from a different perspective, and indeed asking us to look from the donkey's perspective, but one of the points here is that a donkey is not so different from a human, and yet we treat donkeys as if they are. Is Io a cow or a young woman? And do we treat her as if she's a cow once we know she was once human?