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If you take away everything that makes Au Hasard Balthazar great - its subtlety, complexity, dignity - then you are left with Eo, a film that doesn't know what it wants to say, but knows what it wants its audience to feel - it wants you to feel sympathy for the donkey, it wants you to feel awed by its cinematography, and perhaps impressed by its artsy digressions. I could only feel awed by the cinematography, which is admittedly breathtaking.

For the record, I'm not an unfeeling person. The donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar broke my heart. Perhaps because Bresson didn't stoop to maudlin techniques to endear this animal on me. And yet the more the writer/director of Eo tried to make me sympathize with the donkey (and he tries very, very hard) the less I felt.

Eo has nothing to say. Its only commentary is that people don't know how to co-exist with animals, and as a result people often treat animals badly... but this commentary isn't specific to this time or this place. (If you wanted to read into the episode with the truck driver, you could make an argument for there being commentary that addresses toxic masculinity or the migration crisis in Europe . . . But even then the commentary would be shallow and reactionary.)

The writer/director is human, all too human (to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche) in his failure to co-exist with this animal (or animals, considering Eo was portrayed by several donkeys). Perhaps he was afraid that a donkey left to its own devices wouldn't produce the results he wanted, so he manhandled it (them) like so many of the characters he criticizes in the film.

What distinguishes literature from cinema? Among other things, one distinction (as with theatre) is the necessity of performance. What is written must be enacted. It is for this reason that a narrative like "Stranger Than Fiction" is best realized in a theatrical or cinematic context.

Arguably, the meta-narrative in a cinematic context would have been better served if the author (played by Emma Thompson) had been a screenwriter (at the risk of eliciting unwanted comparisons with "Adaptation").

"Republicans didn't start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn't know that money trickled up."

• Will Rogers (1932)

In the 1980s, the term "trickle-down economics" was used to describe President Ronald Reagan's economic policy that included tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy (those on the upper level of the economic spectrum) under the pretense that it would stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term. It was not money or water that would trickle-down literally, but other societal benefits that would trickle-down abstractly.

At the time, Reagan's economic policy was subject to scrutiny and criticism (even Vice President Bush referred to it as "voodoo economics"), and yet its influence is still apparent in the economic irresponsibility of those who followed Reagan (in America and elsewhere). Like the prisoners in a vertical prison relying upon a trick-down system to provide food, we are complacent in the political process, hoping that by our complacence we will be reward (elevated to a higher level) or at the very least not punished (relegated to a lower level).

For the overwhelming majority, as for the majority of those within the vertical prison, power is abstract and unreachable. We obey their rules voluntarily or upon threat of harm (extreme heat or extreme cold), and we hope that we may live to see another day. We know that there are enough resources for everyone to live comfortably, but we have also resigned ourselves to a reality in which resources are not distributed fairly.

The protagonist is a thinking man. But, under the influence of an old and cynical man, he too resigns himself to the realities of the vertical prison. It is not until he meets the dreamer (a woman who is breaking the rules in pursuit of her child who may or may not exist) that he questions the reality (that is, resumes his inherent state as thinker).

When the thinker meets one of the architects of the vertical prison (who has entered the prison to improve its system), he answers a call to action. But first he must reject the cynicism of the old man, who imparted his belief that human nature is to blame (rather than a system the imposes a hierarchy). Though the architect is lost in disillusionment, the thinker meets to doer and enacts a plan to reform the prison once and for all.