© 2024
NPR News, Colorado Stories
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Full Of Misery, 'The Painted Bird' Can Still Dazzle

IFC Films

The Painted Bird, by Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul is not for the faint of heart. The film comes from a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosinski about a young boy, possibly Jewish, sent from some eastern European city to a village to keep him safe from the Nazis during World War II.  What follows is a series of encounters of unbearable barbarity. The boy – who has no name and rarely speaks – is beaten and whipped. He’s attacked by ugly villagers with few teeth and grubby faces radiating hatred, and of course fear.

He witnesses life as if humanity has festered entirely within the confines of our reptilian brain. The worst moment may come when a jealous old farmer gouges the eyes of a young man who eyes his wife. But there are other moments to twist your insides and make you wonder if humanity is at all worth maintaining.

The boy, played by 9-year-old actor Petr Kotlár wanders through a world of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition during the Nazi occupation. The boy is a terrible victim, but also an observer of the some of the worst that humanity can serve up. Villagers think the boy is a Roma or maybe a Jew – some kind of a pariah. He’s an alien who can be blamed for bringing disease, evil spirits, and other calamities. The film shows only enough of the Nazis to let you know that their noxious presence is responsible for the impossibly mangled fabric of society, the destruction of fundamental rules of human behavior – and it has unleashed these miseries.

The Painted Bird is hard to watch, and there are stories of audiences in Europe before the pandemic fleeing the theaters, although director Václav Marhoul says those tales are way exaggerated.

As some have, you might write off The Painted Bird as disgusting excess, but it it’s not just that. This may sound absurd, but it’s also a beautiful movie. Events are foul, but with cinematographer Vladimír Smutný, director Václav Marhoul has shaped stunning portraits of people and objects – faces, the grain in the wood of a barn, the contrast of land and always gray sky. Over and over, the interaction of light and shadow gives incredible richness to the experience of seeing this often terrifying and demoralizing series of events.

It’s not just empty aesthetics; it’s not the ignorant or manipulative prettying up of horror to undermine the power of what happens on screen. I think it’s about the contrast between the beauty of the world and the dreadful things people do with it. But beauty is a problem that filmmakers have contended with since the movies began. Beauty is morally non-committal; beauty can override our moral sense.

In 1819, British poet John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and that’s a dicey proposition.

The movie The Painted Bird yanks you around with its blend of misery and dazzle. The original novel aroused plenty of controversy also. Kosinski was accused of plagiarism and lying about his own life – he and his parents were not set upon by Polish villagers; they were protected by Polish Catholics and a priest at great risk to their own lives. Kosinski, though, said throughout his life that the story is not at all autobiographical. It’s an imaginative look at a world gone insane.

It took director Václav Marhoul over 10 years to make The Painted Bird. And you have to wonder why so much frustration and effort to make a film this hard to watch about events from the 1940s. Marhoul told The Guardian newspaper that while the movie may not be literally true to Jerzy Kosinski’s life; it’s the truth – in a larger sense. And given the world that we live in now, it’s hard to refute what he says.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
Related Content
  • The Truth opens in Paris, but not the monumental Paris of the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Elysees. The story takes place at one house, a big house, with enough trees and grass around it to insulate it from the city. Through the trees, you can glimpse a bus passing on a busy street. In winter, the city will be more visible and louder. For now, though, it’s a protected space for a family to get on each other’s nerves about the stuff that French movie families annoy each other about, and actual families experience with maybe less drama. The house, by the way, needs paint and work on the masonry exterior. Behind the house, there’s a prison – all of this part of the uneasy setting.
  • Da 5 Bloods is like a lot of Spike Lee’s films. It can be brilliant and original, and also tedious and commonplace. It’s sometimes thrilling and perceptive, and also dreary and routine. Overall, though, it’s a critically important demonstration of what the war in Vietnam did to the disproportionate number of black soldiers at the time – and by way of fearsome, debilitating PTSD, how that misery continues in the present.
  • For a good 45 minutes, Joan of Arc looks like it was put together by Monty Python. It’s so stiff and awkward, you figure it’s got to be intentional parody of the many other films about the 15th century St. Joan.