This film is a great example of a bad “flashy” art house. A black and white world full of physiological black. A sign of cheap manipulation, often found in insecure directors.
The film comes with trumps, already in the second minute we see the burning of the pet ferret of the main character by a gang of some scumbags. But the beginning and the beginning: pedophilia, zoophilia, brutal killing of animals, squeezing the eyes with a spoon, betrayal, theft, homosexuality, rape with a bottle, mass shootings and burning of old people, women and children – all this still awaits the viewer ahead.
The main problem of the film is that even being a film adaptation of the novel, pretending to be a subjective experience, the Kolorovana bird oversteps the stick. There are so many blacks that at some point (for me it was a chapter with a lustful fisherman) it is not possible to take what is happening seriously.
No comparison with Edie and watch the movie does not stand. Yes, the boy will meet in the process of his misadventures with the grown-up Fleura, added there obviously not by chance. However, unlike the Soviet classics, they will not show the cruelties of war (well, they will show a little, but they pale against the background of the atrocities of the village population). The main enemy of the boy in this film is the savagery and superstition of the peasants, and they are not caused by war, most of the hardships that happened to the guy in the film could happen in peacetime.
In the Painted Bird, on the contrary, war and its manifestations treat the boy most favorably.
A fascist soldier pitys him and lets him go. Yes, fascists shoot Jews on their way to the death camp, but at least they are clean and educated. Still, during the scene with the train involuntarily catch yourself thinking that the Germans behave not much worse than the local population. What did the author want to achieve by removing the contrast between the fascist invaders and the villagers? It is obvious not to rehabilitate the Germans.
The brightest figures in the whole picture are the Red Army. They temporarily make the boy the son of the regiment, give him food, uniforms, shelter, and try to give him some future within their means. Not demanding sex in return, not insulting or degrading his dignity. Unfortunately, it's a little late, environmental poisoning is already bearing fruit.
The Red Army and the Soviet people were portrayed here as surprisingly good and humane. Better than portrayed in modern cinema. This is quite unexpected from the Czech-Slovak-Ukrainian picture, based on a novel written in the United States by a Polish immigrant.
By the end of the movie, I had a strong feeling that it was the war and 2 opposing armies (who also speak their real languages in the film) that brought at least some semblance of civilization and order to this land, consisting entirely of villages of assholes.
Interslavic plays its role as best it can. By roughly setting the scene, it helps the film not to offend any particular country. It turns out that the whole of Eastern Europe was thrown into the cesspool. It’s a shame that this is the most well-known use of this language. But even so, one cannot get rid of the feeling that the main objective of the film was to show what kind of scum lives between the Reich and the USSR. The accusation is too categorical and one-sided to even seem true.
Even in the end, the boy’s salvation and self-acquisition occurs only on the bus, which takes him away from this hospitable land.
In the end, it is not clear how to react to this film. It seems foolish to accuse him of empty pretentiousness because of the solid blackness, and for such an image of Soviet people I want to somehow help the film to rehabilitate.
In cargo 200 (there is also a bottle scene) there was an attempt to show how a crumbling reality damages the minds of the people living in it. But there it was obvious that it was Balabanov’s dialogue with the modern audience – the 80s were a fresh topic at the time of the film’s release.
In Edie and look (the cow was actually sewn with a machine gun), forced maturation is considered against the background of monstrous sounds.