As a kid, I sat down every week to watch Lassie, it was one of the more engrossing shows on TV. She and Rin-Tin-Tin were very well trained dogs indeed; they were great crime solvers.
Eo is the opposite of those dogs: he just dumbly accepts whatever misfortunes come his way. The human characters have no effect on the story, it's all Eo all of the time. When Bresson made Au hasard Balthasar, he carefully constructed a story for his human characters to work out, but Skolimowski has made no attempt to do the same. The result is a boring story with indifferent people (the circus worker who uses Eo to haul his cart doesn't seem fazed when the officials descend on the circus to seize the property). I felt that the real star of the movie was the wrangler; it must be hard to get a dumb obstinate animal to go through his paces.
Eo is the opposite of those dogs: he just dumbly accepts whatever misfortunes come his way. The human characters have no effect on the story, it's all Eo all of the time. When Bresson made Au hasard Balthasar, he carefully constructed a story for his human characters to work out, but Skolimowski has made no attempt to do the same. The result is a boring story with indifferent people (the circus worker who uses Eo to haul his cart doesn't seem fazed when the officials descend on the circus to seize the property). I felt that the real star of the movie was the wrangler; it must be hard to get a dumb obstinate animal to go through his paces.
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