Movie Review: The Painted Bird

The Painted Bird *** / *****
Directed by: Václav Marhoul.
Written by: Václav Marhoul based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski.
Starring: Petr Kotlár (Joska), Nina Sunevic (Marta), Alla Sokolova (Olga), Michaela Dolezalová (Miller's wife), Udo Kier (Miller), Lech Dyblik (Lekh), Jitka Cvancarová (Ludmila), Stellan Skarsgård (Hans), Dominik Weber (Feldwebel), Harvey Keitel (Priest), Julian Sands (Garbos), Julia Valentova (Labina), Aleksey Kravchenko (Gavrila), Barry Pepper (Mitka), Petr Vanek (Nikodem).

I think it’s fair to say that director Václav Marhoul is incredibly talented, and with The Painted Bird, he made precisely the film he wanted to make. Whether you want to subject yourself to the film itself is an entirely different question. The film is a parade of misery for nearly three hours – starting with a young boy being beaten, and watching as his dog is killed and set on fire – and then enduring all sorts of other torment, misery and abuse for the rest of the film – right until the end, which offers brief respite. It’s not a film that most people would want to see – and frankly, I cannot blame you if you are among them.

Yet the film is so well made, that it deserves attention. The cinematography by Vladimir Smutny is among the best of the year – this is probably the starkest black and white film since Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. The other technical aspects of the film are also top notch. The lead performance, by young Petr Kotlár, is exceptional – basically he is drained of emotion and traumatized throughout, and that is the right note for him to play. The supporting cast is weirdly one of those where familiar faces show up for a scene or two – there’s Udo Kier playing the Udo Kier role as an abusive Miller, there’s Stellan Skarsgard as a soldier, Harvey Keitel as priest, Julian Sands as a child molester, Barry Pepper as a Russian sniper, etc. They all do their roles well.

The flaws in the movie are likely the flaws in the novel by Jerzy Kosinski. It is an acclaimed novel, and one I haven’t read, so I really cannot comment on it, but the film essentially becomes a parade of misery – it’s just one damned thing after another. The poor little boy starts with a distant relative – an older woman who is kind to him, but she dies early on, and from there he is shuttled from one abusive caretaker after another. There are a few moments when you think no, this caretaker may not be that bad – like Harvey Keitel’s priest for example, and then he hands him over to the local pedophile played by Julian Sands – once again proving my theory that you can never trust a character played by Julian Sands. A moment of tranquility – like when the boy is lazily hanging out in a tree with Barry Pepper is interrupted when Pepper raises his sniper rifle and kills a man – explaining that it’s an eye for an eye – and you realize that they are only hanging out in this tree, in this calm, in order to kill people. I haven’t even detailed all the different abuses he suffers – the strange people he comes across, who use and abuse him.

The film takes place in WWII, and yet Marhoul takes pains to underline the fact that not all the abusers are Nazis. It’s a Polish book, but they don’t speak Polish in the movie – instead, it’s a hybrid of Czech, German, Russian and Latin – underscoring the point that everyone in this film is wicked and vile, and prone to abuse.

The obvious inspiration for the film is Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece Come and See – about a young Russian boy who joins the Soviet Resistance in WWII, and experiences the horror of war. Personally though, I thought more of Robert Bresson – of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) – two films about innocents (one a donkey, one a young girl) who suffer one abuse after another – the only relief being death. Bresson, perhaps smartly, realized you can only make those run for so long – you could do a double bill of those two films (and what a pick me up that would be) in just a few short minutes longer than it would take you to watch The Painted Bird.

In the end, for all the skill that obviously went into making The Painted Bird, I couldn’t help but wonder what the ultimate point of it all was – why Marhoul and company felt the need to subject their audience to such pain and abuse for nearly three hours. The skill is evident – what the point of it all is not.