Less than three minutes in its almost three hours, The painted bird It tells you exactly what type of movie you have chosen to undergo. The film begins with a boy (Petr Kotlár) running through the woods, with an opossum or ferret complaining in his arms. Other children, older and more cruel, will catch up. When they do, they quickly hit their front teeth and then burn their pet rodent alive in front of it. Things do not improve for the child from here. In fact, at the conclusion of this exquisitely filmed but numbing meditation on humanity’s capacity for evil, the memory of the experience could count, in relative terms, as one of the happiest. Things can always get worse The painted bird insists. Is there a more 2020 sentiment than that?
“It’s your fault,” says the boy’s elderly guardian when he returns home, bloody and pet-free. It doesn’t matter: he’s dead in his chair a few minutes later. Then comes the house, swallowed by the flames, and suddenly the boy is alone and homeless, forced to cross an inhospitable world in search of refuge. Within minutes, he’s wrapped in a burlap bag and whipped by superstitious villagers, screaming in an interslavic language (never heard before on the screen, press releases gleefully report) of the evil they think has possessed him. The child from here will be threatened, strangled, overworked, hanging from the rafters, buried to the neck in the ground, pecked by crows, and much, much worse.
One could continue. The movie certainly does. It is a marathon of murder, mutilation, rape, pedophilia and bestiality. The Holocaust itself is basically a subplot: although the landscapes and lifestyles sometimes seem downright medieval, the film takes place throughout Eastern Europe around World War II, occasionally deriving from the main story to dramatize, for example , a failed escape from a Deutsche Reichsbahn train. (Eventually we learn that the boy’s parents disappeared when Hitler’s final solution came to his door.) This episodic misery, this odyssey of suffering, comes from an acclaimed novel by Being there author Jerzy Kosinski. Like much of the work of the Polish-American writer, the book was embroiled in an authorship controversy – in this case, the revelation that its litany of horrors was not, as Kosinski initially suggested, autobiographical. Perhaps that deserves more relief than outrage; In the final scene, who wouldn’t like to know that this really didn’t happen to someone?
Strange as it may seem to say about a movie that lasts 170 minutes, The painted bird it’s inexpensive, in its exhausting way. Director Václav Marhoul keeps everything going, from one injustice to the next, each step of the journey outlined in quick, hard brushstrokes. Among the set of tired European faces appear some familiar faces, each of which belongs to an international movie star: Stellan Skarsgård as a merciful Nazi, Harvey Keitel as a kind but foreign priest, Barry Pepper—In a callback to his role in a more sentimental description of the horrors of World War II — like a steely sharpshooter. These cameos are less distracting than 1917—And thank God that The painted bird he doesn’t try to work all his infernal sights in one shot.
One could think of Come and lookElem Klimov’s unceasingly heartbreaking drama of contemporary atrocity, the rare war movie that is legitimately and unquestionably anti-war. But that film immersed viewers not only in violence but also in the terrible psychological experience of their grim circumstances. The painted bird floats at a distance, dispassionately cataloging trauma. Its protagonist is more like Bresson’s perpetually brutalized donkey Au Hasard Balthazar, went from one cruel guardian to the next. Kosinski’s novel provided us with his first-person impressions of abuse. Here, he is just a silent and sturdy shell, less a character than an embodiment of shattered innocence. His only real trait is affection for animals, so of course he will be rigorously methodically disabled; in addition to all the human casualties, The painted bird he erects a pile of animal carcasses, breaks equine necks and, in the metaphorical moment that gives the story its title, sends a marked bird to a flock that takes it as an intruder. We really know that the boy has been reformed by his terrible experiences when he vindictively decapitates a goat.
All this agony is captured with great skill and art. Filmed in Cinemascope, in sharp 35mm black and white, The painted bird it’s nice alone to look, even when its content is indescribably ugly; There are images that will be recorded in your memory, whether you like it or not. However, the film’s emotional spectrum, a flat line of uncompromising despair, is as limited as its color palette. And it sets itself up in such a daunting repetitive (and daunting repetitive) pattern that it begins to resemble self-parody: How many times can we see this child begin to adjust to a new home, only to discover that the adult takes him as sadistic or broken like the last one? The painted bird is, in the end, the kind of work that treats store-worn ideas of man’s brutality as a justification for drowning in evidence, such as an early scene from Udo Kier, in the most disturbing cameo, sculpting The Globes eyepieces of a man with a spoon. Two hours and later, you could envy that man.
.
