The Painted Bird – review | Václav Marhoul’s eastern-European horror show

                The Painted Bird (dir. Václav Marhoul, 2019)

                                            ✭✭✭✭✭

In retrospect, the audiences of the 76^th Venice Film Festival were far too comfortable amid the selection: Hirokazu Koreda’s latest picture, The Truth (2019), and Todd Phillip’s Joker (2019) hardly compromised their afternoons. Václav Marhoul’s third feature, The Painted Bird (2019), offered a visceral antidote with its tour of post-WWII Europe. After its premiere, over twelve viewers were reported to have stumbled out the auditorium (see Xan Brooks’ comic description in The Guardian); this backlash would later repeat at the Toronto and London Film Festivals. 

 

Having faced up to Marhoul’s picture – just shy of three hours – I recognise these reports work to its favour. In the past, films ranging from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) to Gasper Noé’s Irreversible (2002) have gloried in their public attention, equally building the directors’ reputations whilst lionised for their perversities. However, if we criticise these films for their subject matters, then we forget to admire them for their commitment to the cinematic experience.

 

Over nine episodes we follow the movements of an unnamed, Jewish boy (Petr Kotlár) across Nazi-occupied Europe. He rarely speaks, and the number of horrifying experiences endured only seem to harden his mute profile. Swept from one abusive community to another, the boy reconciles with the cruelty of an adult landscape: either through experiences of torture, bestiality, paedophilia or after being pecked by a murder of crows whilst buried in the ground. In a later scene, the boy watches from afar as Nazi guards spray bullets into a group of Jews fleeing from a freight train. Their belongings are quickly plundered, including by the child, out of a necessity to survive. These experiences are brief (thankfully, for the audience) but sketch the realities of a Holocaust Europe.

 

Surprising cameos are also dotted throughout the landscape, including the international stars of Stellan Skarsgård (one of the few, kinder characters); Harvey Keitel (robed as a local priest); and Julian Sands (a deceptively violent miller).

 

Adapted from Jerzy Kosiński’s novel of the same name (published to controversy in 1965), Marhoul pitches its central theme of childhood innocence against a brutal adult world. Telling one episode at a time, the film neatly reflects its literary material: each episode, whilst offering a stepping stone toward the prospect of ‘home,’ provides a variation on the preceding cruelty. Pasolini’s adaptations of The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972) offer comparable narrative structures.

 

Shot in crisp, 35mm monochrome, cinematographer Vladimír Smutný textures The Painted Bird with an uncomfortable beauty. This was undoubtedly intentional, and works to its advantage. Heavy nods to The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960) and Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky, 1962) also abound here, as well as to the films of Béla Tarr and Grigori Kozinstev. The Painted Bird, despite being set in twentieth-century Europe, captures something of their medieval landscapes, peppered with superstition and magic realism. Maybe this is where the terror lies: the smoothness with which the present traffics with the barbarities of the past. It is a muddy and unsettling vision.

 

Now that cinemas are vacant spaces during the time of Covid-19, (and the opportunities for walkouts are left to the foreseeable future), it feels all the more relevant that we are reminded of what defines the cinematic experience. Todd Phillips’ Joker took the Golden Lion home from the festival, a decision I found both dismaying and infuriating; the mound of controversies it stacked was overblown, and unlike The Painted Bird it played its cards relatively safely. 

 

Marhoul’s picture is deserving of its praise, disgust and controversies.