Director – Václav Marhoul – 2019 – Czech Republic – Cert. 18 – 169m
****1/2
An orphan boy meets a series of adults, a few kind but most cruel, travelling around Eastern Europe during World War Two – in cinemas and online at Amazon, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, IFI@HOME, Rio Cinema Online and Vimeo On Demand in the UK from Friday, September 11th
You’re really not quite sure where you are for the first hour of this mammoth Czech production stuffed with Hollywood stars speaking not a word in English. A boy (Petr Kotlár) whose name we won’t discover until the film’s final minutes flees through a wood before being caught by bullies who burn and kill his pet ferret.
That proves prophetic because soon afterwards at night, he discovers that his aunt, with whom he lives, has died upright in her chair. He is so startled that he knocks over an oil lamp and burns the house down. Now he’s an orphan at the mercy of the world, which is not a pleasant one being Eastern Europe at the time of the second world war. The rural people are primitive. Christianity is largely a matter of ritual and superstition; belief in vampires is so widespread that a local witch can claim the boy is a vampire and be believed.
He soon finds himself sold to the old woman who works him hard and treats him badly, the first of many characters he encounters in what is effectively a boy’s road movie through the Eastern Europe of World War Two. Fairly early on, he spends time with bird keeper Lekh (Lech Diblik) who paints a bird’s wings, releases it into a flock in the sky then watches it being torn to pieces. Difference is fatal: to survive, one must be anonymous and behave like everyone else.
The bird keeper is one of the nicer encounters. There are others. German soldier Hans (Stellan Skarsgård) volunteers to execute the boy so he can instead help him escape alive. A kindly priest (Harvey Keitel) schools the boy in the ways of a faith in which the boy has scant interest and finds him somewhere to live. Russian sniper Mitka (Barry Pepper) later looks out for him.
Most of those he meets however prove less charitable. A miller (Udo Kier) viciously beats his own wife and uses a spoon to gouge out the eyes of a man who may or may not be his wife’s lover. Garbos (Julian Sands) is a attender at the priest’s church who is also secretly a paedophile. Nyphomanic Labina (Júlia Vidrnáková) initiates the boy into the delights of sexual congress only to cruelly discard him soon afterwards.
About an hour in, the point of view shifts to people being transported by train by the Nazis as they break out of their trucks, jump and run with their suitcases and/or small children and are shot, first from the train then later systematically as the soldiers return to hunt down and liquidate them. It doesn’t seem any more atrocious than the examples of man’s general inhumanity to man we’ve already seen, except in its mass scale and efficient, premeditated organisation and implementation. We also realise, because it’s not immediately obvious from the start, that the boy is one of the hunted. He is Jewish.
The whole is a catalogue of brutal human atrocity ranging from the personal to the international. Humanity is mostly rotten in this bleak vision, but occasional people here and there exhibit some degree or other of goodness. That makes the film hard going. Some of its nastier portraits of humanity feel a little too caricatured as if they’ve wandered in from an exploitation movie, more likely the fault of the adaptation than the novel’s author Jerzy Kosinski who also wrote the more nuanced book and screenplay for Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979).
The Painted Bird makes good use of its international cast, who so often stick out like a sore thumb in films like this, but generally blend in well here. That said, you wonder if the film would be just as good with well chosen, non name actors. Shot in austere black and white with bags of style, its well paced. Tough going in places, indeed, but ultimately worth the effort.
The Painted Bird is out in cinemas and online at Amazon, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, IFI@HOME, Rio Cinema Online and Vimeo On Demand in the UK on Friday, September 11th.
Trailer: