An epic pastoral horror pitting human savagery in opposition to the unimaginable calm of nature, Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Polish creator Jerzy Kosiński’s rattling World War II novel “The Painted Bird” is as daring a play for visceral cinema mastery as we’ve seen of late.
This black-and-white, almost three-hour saga of a boy (nonprofessional Petr Kotlár, in a shocking flip) navigating the cruelties and caprices of ravaged rural Eastern Europe shouldn’t be the wallowing miserablist parade you would possibly worry, but not fairly the Holocaust-themed masterpiece it needs to be. But the movie, which premiered on the 2019 Venice Film Festival to the type of emotional reactions (walkouts, raves) that may cement a troubling work’s need-to-see repute, is at all times starkly compelling as a reminder of why battle survival tales are important to our understanding of innocence and beastliness.
Kosiński’s 1965 guide was a litmus take a look at of types, first for the unvarnished brutality inside its pages (killings, rape, torture, bestiality). Later it was found to be an ambiguously sourced work that fused the autobiographical and imagined. But what has remained throughout the fraught historical past of its method and authorship is its narrative energy as a wartime story, instructed as a fractured fable by which peril reigns and morals are absent.
Marhoul’s movie isn’t shy in regards to the regular stream of ugliness, and that’s more likely to flip away the terror-sensitive, and but its immersive aesthetic additionally permits for the visually poetic and compassionate, even when these moments are few and much between.
Our unnamed protagonist, performed by Kotlár with uncanny watchfulness, shouldn’t be explicitly recognized as Jewish or Roma. But as a result of he’s been despatched by his mother and father to reside within the remotest a part of his nation — additionally by no means straight named (and Marhoul selected a Slavic combine for the dialogue to keep away from specificity) — we sense ever-present hazard. In the opening scene, he’s chased by way of the woods by anti-Semitic boys who beat him, then set his pet ferret on hearth. When he later discovers his stooped guardian Marta (Nina Sunevic) useless in her chair, he by accident units her complete farmhouse ablaze, forcing him to wander an alternatively harsh and bucolic land seemingly untouched by civilized progress.
Captured by wretched, superstitious villagers, he’s bought by an aged witch physician (Ala Sakalova) as a slave/apprentice, after which he finds shelter with a crusty miller (an particularly terrifying Udo Kier) whose raging jealousy results in a stunning act of violence towards the person he suspects is sleeping together with his spouse. This sequence is the closest to one thing out of a midnight film, however there’s additionally metaphoric heft to the picture of eyeballs gouged, somebody’s sight eliminated.
A short stick with a lonely outdated birdkeeper (Lech Dyblik) who often meets a wild-eyed forest girl (Jitka Ĉvanĉarová) for intercourse ends savagely and tragically by the hands of livid townswomen, however not earlier than the person exhibits the boy a telling amusement of his: daubing paint on a hen, sending it to fulfill its flock, solely to observe the group viciously assault it as an unrecognizable alien.
After that, the treacherous terrain continues, together with a nightmarish sequence by which Jews leaping off a shifting practice are mowed down by Nazis. Other scenes are marked by charity turned the pitiless, as when a pleasant priest (Harvey Keitel, dubbed however bodily efficient) saves the boy from Germans solely to entrust him with an abusive congregant (Julian Sands), and when the attentions of a lustful farmwoman (Julia Valentova) queasily combine predation and tenderness, then morph into emotional cruelty that additional hardens the boy’s relentlessly beset soul.
It’s a curious shading that Kosiński’s story paints villagers and peasantry as probably the most breathlessly terrible tormentors, as if battle’s hellishness have been a license to let long-festering ignorance and worry wreak havoc, whereas the mini-portraits…
