The Second World War was a grim time to be in Eastern Europe; The Painted Bird depicts it as the seventh circle of hell, in which episode after episode ends in horror but adds precious little to our understanding of the war or its victims.
Czech Republic
2.5*
Director:
Václav Marhoul
Screenwriter:
Václav Marhoul
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný
Running time: 165 minutes
Original title: Nabarvené ptáče
Persistent death by gunshot, brutal eye-gouging, paedophilia, skull-pecking, shoving a glass bottle up a woman’s vagina. These are just some of the horrific acts inflicted on the characters of The Painted Bird for no apparent reason. It also features a good-hearted Nazi soldier as one of its lone sympathetic characters, which is almost always a bad idea.
Based on the eponymous novel by Polish writer and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosiński, the plot comprises a string of nine episodes. And each of them tries to top the horrors of the previous one. The story, filmed in gorgeous black and white, takes place during the Second World War in an unnamed East European country where everyone speaks a fictitious Slavic language (Interslavic, an artificial language developed by Vojtěch Merunka).
Everyone, that is, except the main character, who is called Joska but remains anonymous until close to the end. We first lay eyes on him when he is about 10 years old, and over the course of the film, he ages enough for us to notice the passage of time. Played by Czech actor Petr Kotlár, he speaks Czech, is Jewish and lives on a farm with an old lady named Marta. To demonstrate how obscure the storytelling is, it is wholly unclear whether this is just a nice old woman, his grandmother or his aunt, and reviews filed from the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival have come up with different interpretations.
In the very first scene, he is already being terrorised, as a group of young boys pursue him through the forest and eventually catch up to him. They grab his pet ferret, pour gasoline over it and set it alight. Together with Joska, we watch helplessly as the animal twitches in agony before it ultimately stops moving and turns into a pile of soot. But much greater tragedy lies ahead for the poor boy.
Very soon, Marta dies from old age, and when he discovers her, his shock is such that he drops the lantern and burns down the house. This incident sets him on a journey of discovery not so much of himself but of the evil in people. Hell is other people, director Václav Marhoul seems to be saying.
These hellish figures take many forms, but most of the episodes are so superficial that there is no chance to get to know the characters before they inevitably die in a variety of ways or commit atrocious acts that send Joska fleeing their company or, often, both. After his parents have left (or were taken) but before all the other tragedies befall him, he already engages very little with Marta, and he is so emotionally isolated that it takes him a full day to discover she has died.
What follows are episodes of such depravity that it is difficult to view them as anything but gratuitous – flogging a dead horse to give the illusion it is still breathing. In the next village, Joska is taken under the wing of a sorceress named Olga, who buries him upright, leaving only his head exposed and sticking out of the ground. This leads to a gruesome scene in which giant crows descend on him. At first, he scares them away by screaming at them, but when they return he inexplicably falls silent, and they start pecking at his shaved head.
He escapes the crows’ claws and Olga’s clutches, only to face the first truly disgusting setup at a mill, whose miller (played by Udo Kier) is paranoid that his wife, whom he beats all too frequently, is interested in another man and proceeds to gouge out the poor man’s eyes. We get a giant close-up of the eyes lying on the ground. Later, the naïve Joska tries to return the eyes to the man, who now sports giant black holes for sockets.
And so it goes, on and on. Before long, he witnesses a woman being raped with a milk bottle, is forced to eat out a lascivious young widow and is himself raped more than once by a man who buys him from the local priest, played by Harvel Keitel. There is simply no end to the cruelty. And yet, we never get any insight into Joska’s mind, because he is more or less expressionless throughout the ordeal.
The concatenation of horrors offers no point of entry for the viewer but, instead, beats us over the head with some universally loathsome villagers committing unspeakable acts. If Marhoul had wanted to convey to us that the Nazis were not the only bad people fighting the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and that the non-Jewish population was similarly deplorable, he could easily have found a better way.
But arguably as controversial as anything else is a scene in which Stellan Skarsgård makes an appearance as a Nazi called Hans. Soon after a drunk Soviet soldier tells the villagers to deliver Joska to a nearby group of German soldiers, Joska is seen walking the train tracks accompanied by a clearly conflicted Hans. But rather than kill him, Hans, for no real reason other than this is what the screenplay obliges him to do, lets the boy escape. The film contains barely any warfare to speak of, and for the most part, Nazis are wholly absent. Therefore, it is pretty distasteful for the director to insert them here and make one of them the kindly Hans, whom we never get to understand beyond his charitable act.
The Painted Bird‘s one major missed opportunity comes right at the end, when Joska is sitting around a fire under a bridge with fellow war survivors. This scene goes nowhere but would have made sense and packed a serious punch if some of the faces had been shown to belong to some of his erstwhile adversaries. There are certainly more examples of this, but one scene that springs to mind where this is done correctly is the celebration in the streets shortly after the Normandy landings towards the end of Claude Lelouch’s Les Misérables.
There are only three commendable elements here: Firstly, the idea of using Czech as the “outside language” even though it is mutually intelligible with Interslavic is a brilliant metaphor for Joska’s “outsider” status as a Jew among the general population. In addition, the fact that Kotlár himself is a Gypsy gives further depth to this metaphor. Second, the images are beautiful, although they stick in our heads for their grisly content rather than their composition. And third, a scene late in the film when Joska shares a tree with taciturn Soviet soldier Mitka (Barry Pepper) is disarmingly charming, with them finding a moment of real serenity amid the gloom. That is, before Mitka mows down the inhabitants of a small village.
The Painted Bird is an austere account of war. Its sympathies are ambiguous, but its intention is clearly to shock us rather than put us in the shoes of its main character. The shocks are grotesque, and instead of punctuating the plot, they end up being the plot.
The film’s screenings at the international festivals in Venice and Toronto were followed by sensational reports of people fleeing the cinema, distressed by the events they were forced to witness. It has to be noted here that the implication was always that people can’t handle the truth. Let me offer a counterpoint: Sometimes people simply walk out of a screening because the film is bad.