A good film, laconic in each episode, which is thus brought to the symbol, and a film with endless scenes of violence, cruelty, perversions can be watched. It's a work of art.
The Painted Bird by Czech director Vaclav Marhoul is perhaps the most violent film I have seen so far. Critics and especially the audience of the 76th Venice Film Festival, who left the hall while watching, found it too cruel. I dare say that they were impatient to take a shower, so as soon as possible to wash off the dirt, blood, sweat and other impurities that the film spills on you.
The opening title of "Painted Bird" could well be meeting sinners in the hellish pre-banner "Leave hope all who enter here." Those who dare, like Dante, to descend into the underworld, are waiting for a three-hour monochrome trip through the darkest corners of human nature by the hand of the Jewish boy Yoska.
The basis of the picture was the novel of the same name by the Pole Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965. The story, for a time considered autobiographical, takes place somewhere in the war-torn lands of Eastern Europe. This geographical unknown is largely due to one of the interesting features of the film - its characters speak the so-called inter-Slavic language, in which echoes of Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian are heard.
Joska's parents, running from a German bullet and a gas chamber, decide to leave the boy in the care of grandmother in the wilderness forgotten by God. But the old woman soon dies, and a sensitive, gentle boy who loves animals and plays the upset piano is forced to go in search of home and relatives. For its unlikeness black Yoska, akin to a bird smeared with white paint, will be subjected to cruel attacks of relatives. He will be beaten, raped, humiliated. But will this chick be whipped to death?
As for the boy, whose name will be replaced by numbers on his shirt by the end of the film, he was played by non-professional actor Petr Cotlar. According to the director, he saw him when he was writing the script in the Czech Krumlov, in a beer housed by a gypsy family, and immediately, without castings, took Peter to the role. His colleagues on the set, among others, were Stellan Skarsgård, Harvey Keitel, Alexey Kravchenko, whose hero in 1985 faced the horrors of war in Go and See.
The War in Painted Bird is not shown in the number of soldiers on screen. Her presence is felt in what she does to the lives and souls of ordinary people. Like a virus, it finds their weaknesses, bringing inflammation to the limit, and the person himself to madness. While it seems that aggression, hatred, malice and the atrocities they caused were born out of blood and a mountain of corpses, Marhole insists that the film is not about war or the Holocaust. World War II is a field environment for researching people and what they are capable of. Perhaps with the hypothesis that there is light in us, too. And how to test it, how to know that there is still goodness, honesty, mercy, if you do not plunge into absolute darkness?
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.
A lot in the perception of war by non-participants gives the formation of a historical series. The defining sources will be those that sound more frequent, brighter, more emotional. Being from the generation of grandchildren of the Great Patriotic War, I remember my perception - refined heroic. Let us leave aside the question of whether it is right. The first test for my perception was Elem Klimov’s film Go and See, when a new, unpleasant, tragic facet of war opened at the level of the child’s subconscious. The painted bird is the next facet of perception and revelation. The film shows that with the war, it manifests itself, and in places repeatedly aggravates, in man the animal essence and animal nature, cruel, uncompromising, incinerating with its purgatory revelation. The child was sent by his parents to the rear for rescue. However, the experience can deprive them of reason and adult. Scenes of senseless cruelty, lust, archaic acts are discouraging. Black and white is not chosen by chance: there is no place for semitones and shades. It's the way it is. Having passed the vile, dirty, mournful, infernal path with the hero, you purify yourself, sober yourself in assessing human nature. The question that remained after watching the film is one: how to explain the main character, the actor-child the meaning and purpose of the filmed. At one time, Alexei Kravchenko, who played the main role in the film Go and See, was forced to watch footage of the terrible chronicle of those years. But here is another situation and task. And a younger actor.
There is a constant war in man. And he decides whether to win, or to remain defeated, or to administer justice himself.
Many watched, and those who did not watch, at least heard about the military film Go and See (1985) directed by Elem Klimov with the debut role of sixteen-year-old then actor Alexei Kravchenko. "Go and See" received recognition at many film festivals, including won prizes at the International Film Festival and later received an award in Venice. And “Go and See” is recognized as one of the most terrible films about the Second World War, and those who watch this film will never forget it, and nerves of steel are needed to watch it from beginning to end. And now the efforts of Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian filmmakers and producers in the same rank as “Go and See” can record a terrifying picture “Painted Bird” directed by Vaclav Markhoul, based on the novel of the same name by an American writer of Polish-Jewish origin Jerzy Kosinski.
It is true that many historians of film and literature have questioned the veracity of Kosinsky’s book, but the author has never claimed that it is autobiographical. The central character of The Painted Bird is a young boy named Yoska. At the beginning of the Second World War, the parents send Yoska to his relatives in a frank deafness, which the language cannot be called a village. From the first shots, it becomes clear that people live according to some animal laws, and cruelty and superstition are the norm of existence and survival. The fact that Yoska is also Jewish leads many to frenzy, for which he will be subjected to incredible torture, both physical and spiritual, more than once throughout the film. It is necessary here to warn the impressionable viewer that it is strictly not recommended to watch him “Painted Bird”.
Personally, I still have before my eyes the first scenes of the almost three-hour film, when child cruelty plunges into shock and stupor. But did I know that this is just the beginning and these shots are not the most terrible, which literally filled the drama “Painted Bird”. In general, the film consists of several separate chapters, connected by tragic events that tried the strength of the little boy Yosku. And staying in a conditional village among poor peasants, clearly lagging behind civilization, will be the easiest test for Yoski. And it is impossible to describe in ordinary words that horror and outright aversion to what is happening and people who do evil because of their lack of culture. Although the view from shown on the screen is sometimes taken away, because for a civilized person, the "Painted Bird" is a set of architecture at the level of the prehistoric period.
I don’t even know how to describe acting, because a movie like ‘Painted Bird’ is out of categories and a lot of actors have played their first and possibly last roles. But in addition to Peter Kotlyar, who played Yoska, you can remember Yulia Valentova, from a concerned, perverted, vile and angry character whose goosebumps run from hostility. But in addition to outspoken amateurs, several very remarkable personalities in the world of cinema were involved in the film. Among them are Udo Kir with his dangerous almost psychopathic maniac, Stellan Skarsgård in the role of a German soldier, Harvey Keitel, who has almost the only positive character in the film, Julian Sands, who wanted to strangle with his own hands, Barry Pepper in the role of a Soviet communist soldier. And, the most interesting thing is that there is Alexey Kravchenko, who was probably not at ease, because “Painted Bird” clearly forced him to return to the time of filming “Go and see”.
In general, summing up about the "Painted Bird", I want to emphasize once again in bold that it is strictly forbidden to watch this picture for impressionable people or with a weak psyche. To see what is completely happening in the “Painted Bird” is not for everyone, you need to have strong enough nerves to perceive everything that is shown to us in it. Therefore, if you still decide to watch it, then be ready to experience a lot of negative emotions, and the plume from them will stretch for a long time. And you can have nightmares. Cinema is out of categories, I will leave it without evaluation. Everyone is authorized to evaluate the action in the "Painted Bird".
Looking at the poster, I would think “some other anti-war passerby on the book of Jerzy Kosinsky”.
Perhaps that’s why I wrote this mini-review to help the film you’re probably hearing about for the first time break through the tons of information that surrounds us these days and get to know your audience.
(And, of course, I pull myself out of the abyss of doing nothing.) Criticism is everything.
Well, meet the Eastern European film “Painted Bird”, which, in my opinion, is not in vain received the Leoncino d’Oro Agiscuola Award at the Venice Film Festival 2019 for promoting the goals and objectives of UNICEF.
To begin with, like a movie, let’s escape the description of a specific place and action, and meet a boy who, by the will of fate, finds himself in a foreign land, a country in the middle of a hostile wasteland where residents speak an incomprehensible language, and mom and dad have disappeared somewhere. The boy has a long way ahead, a journey three hours long of your life, straight to hell!
Don’t be fooled, this is not a historical film (does this ever happen?).
The place and time of action, although it may seem recognizable in everyday things, interior, military uniform, weapons, crosses, swastika or stars of David, is nevertheless a curved mirror through which the boy perceives the world.
And the world is -- wow.
Dirty, rotting, superstitious, a world of weaknesses and insurmountable vices, a black and white desert of the torment of all living beings without end and without edge.
People are part of this chthonic world: incorrigible, irredeemable.
The war is just a continuation of it.
Welcome, as the movie says.
A journey into the heart of darkness will not be chewed up for explanation. Cinema is silent. And if he speaks, he taunts curses in his "Inter-Slavic" language (leave the dubbing, this time everything will be clear). It remains to grab the parts thrown like bones and collect them in a pile, to think about what is happening. However, it is not difficult - the plot does not move into the ditch of an incomprehensible art house.
The film reminds of the Dead Man, the Apocalypse Today and Ivanovo Childhood, forgive the sinful soul, and consists of novels named after the characters the boy meets on his way.
I have to admit, I'm fucked with caste. - Udo Kir, Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgard, Barry Pepper. And one of the Russian officers was played by Alexei Kravchenko (Go and See).
Peter Cotlar perfectly and without complaints performed the boy, despite the most difficult main role.
The film is cruel, but the violence on the screen does not go into the category of Ultra, does not break the tender perception of the viewer to disgust, thanks to the delicate work of the operator or the time cut off scene.
Monumental shooting on the old “twisting” optics, and the masterful creation of light shade on black and white film, organize an unreal atmosphere.
Special mention deserves the scene of the attack of the Cossacks on the village. I just can't help it, I'm sorry, it was so funny.
From the overall heavy narrative of the tape, appears, it seemed, the most final limit, heavy artillery, the point of peak violence.
The defenseless villagers are attacked by Cossacks. But not ordinary, but Nazi Cossacks. A horse-drawn sheep enters the village.
Uh. There's gonna be a tin in all the paint. There will be a massacre.
And it begins. But the film just takes over that last peak of violence and SPECIALLY moves on. And of course it goes to the absurd. And of course, it's wildly funny.
He does indeed begin to count the “horrors of war,” but does so playfully, as in Bosch’s paintings, collecting a collection of all the clichés about the robber attack: Here we have a cavalryman on the run will kill his grandfather with a checker, there the barn will burn with a torch, one girl rapes right on horseback, another stabs the priest with his own cross “Die, saint!”.
The leader of the gang, as befits a king, sits in a cart on an improvised throne and leniently shoots the villagers from the German PP from the thigh. Everyone is burning, screaming, and drinking moonshine continues!
Then the Red Army appears and begins to wet the robbers.
Choort... I don’t know what it was, but it was fucking funny.
The film is just one scene turns into a thrash and epically brings itself to absurdity with the explosion of a burning wagon with “Wilhelm’s cry”. And then a new novel begins.
What about the cranberries? And the cranberries are not!
Okay. At this point, my mini-review came off.
In general, the film is not recommended to everyone for the evening - it is too tight and gloomy.
But I take my hat off to the director, the producer, the screenwriter in one person - Václav Markhoul, he managed, I think, to find this balance in the middle of phantasmagoria and realism, and run, so to speak, on the razor blade.
“Painted bird” is not a pretentious serious work, trying to objectively recount the “horrors of war” – but rather an abstract trip to hell in the Slavic entourage, where war, well, is the background.
Thanks for reading.
“There, far above us, God rules the world.”
Now I understand why he doesn't have time for a little black bug like me. It was occupied by huge armies, innumerable fighting men, animals and machines. He had to decide who would win and who would lose, who would live and who would die.
- Jerzy Kosinski
Ball Jerzy Kosinski wanted his novel to be brought to the screen by Buñuel or Fellini. They were firsthand acquainted with the realities of war and, apparently, could properly feel the tragedy in the eerie and, perhaps, provocative story of a lonely nameless Boy, abandoned in 1939 from the intelligent environment of a large city in a remote wild territory, lost somewhere among the swamps and forests, villages and small towns of Eastern Europe. “Painted Bird” never appeared on film during the life of the author and only decades after writing entered the filmography of Vaclav Markhoul. The Czech director has not yet achieved Fellini’s fame, but has already fought and seen a lot in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, that is why the scenes of violence from the book were surprisingly accurately recreated in the peremptory black and white shots of this picture. Marhole, of course, says that he did not seek to show violence completely to the forehead, but the scene of rape with a bottle is still hardly worth the nerves of a sensitive viewer, from whichever side the camera shows it. A boy named Yoshka is thrown from one such scene to another for more than two hours, not giving the opportunity to rest neither the viewer nor the unfortunate child who will be beaten, raped, hanged by the hands and rolled in shit. At the beginning of the events, Joschke is about 6 years old, and the age of the boy, along with the theme of survival, brings this film together not with the film Go and See, which inspired the director, but rather with Anna’s War. In the book, the story is conducted in the first person, which allows you to penetrate into the inner world of the child and see what exactly forms his worldview. In the film there is no voiceover of the boy, and in relations with hostile Slavic peasants who perceive the Jewish child as a kind of alien creature (a bird of a different color), we do not see how he communicates with them with words. Apparently, words are a means of communication of equals, to which Joshka is not included here. The wordlessness of the boy becomes a rigid obstacle in the development of his personality, which is completely absent in the book. In fact, we see only a ball that is kicked from court to court. The ball is gradually saturated with the mud of other people's souls, as can be seen on the scene when Yoshka beats the old man with a stick. The child is already weaned to perceive words, for example, the words of the Red Army soldier Gavrila, but perfectly absorbs actions - revenge committed by Mitka leaves a deep mark in his soul. A significant layer of the film is the world of peasants living in savagery and superstition. The German New Order, the Christian life of the priests, and the blessings of liberation that the Red Army brings are but a fragile film over this world of seemingly eternal irrational violence. Joschke understands and somehow adjusts to the sadist Garbus at all impossible, but it is easy to please the SS, cleaning his shoes, and thereby save his life. The tribal consciousness of the inhabitants of this world surprisingly easily adapted to the Nazi order, in contrast to the consciousness of those citizens who were driven by cars through these wild lands to concentration camps. These educated cultured townspeople were also birds of a different color. The director's liberties with the text of the book are sometimes incomprehensible when, in one scene, Marhole replaces white guerrillas with red ones. In other cases, the liberties are intended to emphasize the Jewish theme brought to the story by the director himself. An unnamed dark boy with no indication of nationality becomes a Jew Yoshka in the film. Apparently, that is why the brown Kalmyk Cossacks, in which the Boy sees people similar to himself in color, became Cossacks with European appearance in the film. National certainty negates the existential loneliness of the book protagonist and gives the child the finding of himself and his personal Path in the final humanistic chord of the inscription of his name on the bus window. 6 out of 10 Original
Throwing a boy around the world. From one person to another, through fields and rivers, through snow and mud, through lust and brutality, everything carries it somewhere and carries fate. And he does not mind especially, and he has no choice: you need to live somehow.
With the naked eye you can easily find motives similar to 'Go and watch' - a famous Soviet film about the horrors that war brings to an individual. However, in fact, their similarity ends with the concept ' the boy survives World War II' because they still have completely different sources. However, it is worth paying tribute to Markhoul for the fact that he decided, as it seems to me, not to neglect the obvious affinity of the films and added Alexey Kravchenko to it, which became the most obvious reference to the work of Elem Klimov for the viewer. But still, the films turned out to be different in everything, and if Fleura at the end literally grew old, covered with wrinkles that cut the dried and discolored skin, then Yoska rather stale, acquiring a cold and ruthless look.
In fact 'Bird' is a road-movie. Moving between the episodes named after the characters appearing in them, the protagonist finds himself in situations of varying degrees of surrealism and naturalism. Yoska enters the lives and fates of other people literally for a short time to see the guts of each of the strangers, get a new scar on the body or soul, and go on to try to survive. One might even think that all this is an allusion to the seven deadly sins, or the nine circles of hell, on which the boy moves closer to the main evil - to war. However, the fact that the film is associated with the war, the viewer will remember only somewhere in the middle of a long film. Therefore, I believe that this movie is not quite about war: she is rather the same character as those who Yoska met on his way and before - another experience in his not too long life, another step towards the formation of a personality, cultivating in a young mind distrust of the world and fixing some principles. A step towards growing up.
The film is straight and consistent like an arrow, which makes its timekeeping at almost three hours seems difficult to digest only in the physical plane: you get tired of sitting. But it looks easy and free, than sweeten the pill of its duration. In fact, there are very few useless scenes, long exposure and long and boring silence à la Refn, which you would expect from a three-hour work, just too much happens, so much that by the last third you forget what was in the first. It is not without skill, with metaphors for everyone and everyone.
'Painted Bird' is not a thrash or arthouse, as it may seem at first glance. He is not too naturalistic, not too cruel, and not at all abstract. A clear and understandable story of the survival and growing up of a young boy in a sick and insane world devoid of compassion, ethics and pity. By the end, we can say for sure that this chick with painted feathers relatives will not be able to peck.
7 out of 10
Here is a piece of text from the book (referring to the entry of the Red Army into the territory of Western Ukraine), enjoy: Meanwhile, the riders scattered around the village. One of them, a stocky man in an officer's cap, shouted orders. Kalmyks jumped off horses, tied them to hedges. From under the saddles they took out meat, which was cooked while riding on heat from the horse and the rider. They ate gray-blue meat and drank large sips of voluminous bottles made of pumpkin. Some of them have already arrived. They went into the houses and pulled out women who had not managed to hide. Their husbands, armed with braids, tried to protect them. The Kalmyk killed one of them. The others wanted to escape, but they were caught by bullets. The Kalmyks were scattered at home. Screams were coming from everywhere. I climbed into a small thick thicket of raspberries right in the center of the square and spread out there like a worm. Before my eyes, the village exploded in panic. The men tried to protect the houses in which the Kalmyks already owned. There were still shots; a man wounded in the head, blinded by his own blood, ran around the square. Kalmyk killed him. In different directions, sifting through fences and pits, frightened children ran away. One boy jumped into the raspberry, but when he saw me, he ran back and was hit by a horse. Kalmyks dragged a half-dressed woman out of the house. She burst out and screamed, vainly trying to kick the tormentors. Several laughing riders with whips rounded up a group of women and girls. Their fathers, husbands and brothers ran begging for mercy, but they were driven away with whips and sabers. On the main street ran a peasant with a severed hand. Blood was pouring out of the stump, and he kept looking for his family.
I went and saw the big picture, but I was a little disappointed.
I was very much waiting for this picture, and with a sinking heart I went to the Kiev cinema “Zhovten” on October 27 for the premiere within the framework of “Kyiv Criticism Week”.
A little boy, Yoska, wanders through dirty and half-abandoned Polish villages in search of warmth and food, while the great tragedy of World War II and the Holocaust unfolds somewhere very close by. Joska is a Jew, and his parents, feeling the danger of the Germans approaching Poland, send him far away to the godforsaken Polish village to his aunt – of course, out of the best of intentions, out of love. Yes, Yoska avoids the concentration camp, but the Polish rear has prepared for him no less terrible trials.
Yoska encounters a much more banal evil – the cruelty, closure, and brutality that is inherent in all people on Earth – in one way or another – and will be part of their nature for the rest of the world. After the sudden death of his aunt, the boy leaves his home in search of food or care, but everyone he meets is extremely cruel to him. We are used to talking about the “inexplicable” cruelty of German guards in concentration camps, but are ordinary Polish villagers in a hungry and half-abandoned village more humane? The boy is beaten, tortured, forced to work hard, tried to kill and forced to satisfy their dirty desires. The boy, unlike his father, will not be in a concentration camp, but his share of suffering and horrors is likely to fall more.
Initially, we see a kind and naive boy who is absolutely unprepared for the cruelty of others, but in the process we see how Yoska learns from these people of cruelty – by the end of the film, he becomes no less cold, calculating and ruthless. Society left its mark on him. The very name - Painted Bird, is associated with the custom existing in the villages to catch and paint in bright colors pichuks, and then release them to the wild. Birds were thus doomed to death: they became strangers, they were not taken back into the flock and even pecked to death.
The film was created for ten years based on the world-famous novel by Polish-American writer Jerzy Kosinski Painted Bird was created jointly by the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine. Interestingly, the characters of the film speak an artificial "new Slavic", which is neither Polish nor Ukrainian. The director flatly refused to shoot in English because he thought it would destroy the film. About the same beliefs the film was shot on black and white film.
German soldiers are played by German actors and Russian soldiers by Russians. The author of the film strives for authenticity and he is good at it – when watching the film it feels like watching a real document of that era. In some places, the picture resembles stunning images from Bergman’s early films.
The painted bird is an important film, it should be seen out of duty – universal, as well as out of love for real cinema – as an art. But it didn’t blossom in my heart as it did with Go and See, there was more to it than cruelty and horror.