The Painted Bird

MOVIE #1,078 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.25.23 The Painted Bird begins like such (see below) …and then proceeds to torture that child in pretty much every way you could imagine (psychologically, physically, and everything in between) for the better part of three hours. It is the ALL GAS NO BREAKS of films about the atrocities mankind unloads on one another. The main and perhaps only complaint I’ve seen levied against this boils down to just that: this is human suffering porn and human suffering porn sucks. I actually saw that phrase (“human suffering porn”) used and it struck me (there’s no shortage of shitty takes on this btw). That writer clearly had to make a distinction between this wonderfully shot black-and-white epic and something like Saw VI. To say, “I get that this Art, and I see how it checks off the boxes which makes something Art, but my mind can’t parse any contrast between Jigsaw and Udo Kier.” You can’t really have it both ways, though.

Where torture porn exists purely in service of delivering those salacious goods, this strives to use those elements in service of delivering a message. Like any good war movie, this is stridently anti-war. And like the best war movies, it isn’t political in the slightest. The Czech writer-director, Václav Marhoul, went as far as to use the Interslavic language (an auxiliary dialect used to facilitate communication between speakers of various Slavic languages) in order to obscure the actual location of these various Eastern Europe settings. One whiny critic actually wrote that “none of the film takes place in Germany [and] very little of the evil done to the kid has anything to do with Germans or Nazis.” Like we needed to cut to a shot of Hitler pouting to understand why these people were living this way.

This movie is based on a 1965 book with a complex and fascinating backstory (its author is Jerzy Kosiński, who also penned Being There). It’s pure fiction but what we know about the hell that was WWII suggests that all the gruesome elements aren’t altogether fantastical. The parallels/similarities to the all-time classic Come and See (1985), at least on the surface, are instant and unmistakable even if they’re not much more than “war seen through the eyes of a young boy.” (Interestingly enough, Alexsey Kravchenko — who portrayed the boy in Come and See — plays a Russian military officer here, and one of the few “good guys” in The Painted Bird.) I don’t think this is quite on par with Klimov’s generational effort, but I’d still say it’s a must-watch. As it turns out, this is simply a premium delivery system for the anti-war system.

For me, a grizzled vet of fucked-up horror, the worst moments weren’t the violent and sicko outbursts, like when Udo Kier gouges a man’s eyes out with a spoon. It was seeing the young boy striving to stay connected to some semblance of humanity in the wake of such things, like when he futilely delivers said eyeballs back to the man crying in the woods.

It was a fascinating choice to cast name actors, from all over the world, in small but important supporting roles in these various vignettes (the film is separated into seven specific chapters that could easily be viewed as shorts in their own right). Stellan Skarsgård doesn’t utter a single line of dialogue and Barry Pepper, just one or two. There’s the aforementioned Kier, and Harvey Keitel plays a priest. The late Julian Sands is a pedophile who gets eaten alive by rats. Like using the Impact font on the movie poster and inter-titles, this decision left me scratching my head, though not in a bad way.

But in the end, this is child actor Petr Kotlár’s movie. To subject someone as young as that to what we ultimately find onscreen isn’t without a degree of moral ambiguity. That two stand-ins get a special shout-out in the credits alleviates some of this grief/guilt, but it’s still worth mentioning. While I believe this is a much more valid complaint than simply stating you (an adult) were personally offended by the content, I choose to see this through a lens of bravery. He’s really great in this without every speaking a word. I hope it doesn’t/didn’t fuck his life up.

I don’t think this movie is begging you to look away. I think it’s trying to make you look harder at what and why this could happen. Yes, all those Nazis we don’t actually see, among many other things. It doesn’t spell it out and never offers a concrete answer. The chief film critic of Variety walked out of this and in his “review” he willfully offers up a list of all the other films he’s walked out of, among them:

I couldn’t get past the opening credits sequence of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” (which had already managed to cutesify my favorite song, “Brandy” by Looking Glass), as Baby Groot dances to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” while the ensemble fights a space alien in the background. I’d enjoyed the original, but the Guardians had clearly gotten too cool to care, so why should I?

Everyone’s hell is vastly different in the end. My 2¢? Let’s try to relate, even when that seems so painful that it’s impossible. For example, I would have walked out of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 also.

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The Painted Bird (Czech: Nabarvené ptáče, Interslavic: Kolorovana ptica) is a 2019 internationally co-produced black and white war drama film written, directed and produced by Václav Marhoul. An adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's novel of the same name, it is the first film to feature the Interslavic language; Marhoul stated that he decided to use Interslavic so that no Slavic nation would nationally identify with the story. It was released on September 3, 2019.