The Painted Bird (2019): Arthouse or Endurance Test? (Review)

Václav Marhoul’s WWII Eastern European-set film opens with a boy’s pet ferret being set alight and burned alive by a group of bullies. The sight of the ferret, disorientated, panicked and squealing in agony as it attempts the impossible and outrun the flames that so quickly engulf its body, ought to signify to any audience that this is a movie not for the faint of heart. If I tell you that the film then proceeds to show the boy lose his elderly grandmother and his home in a house fire, get cast out of the village by a superstitious community who believe him to be evil, succumb to an illness which leads his new guardian – a snake-oil trader – to bury him in a field, leaving his head free for the birds to peck at, and then fall in with a miller who, suspecting his worker has eyes for his younger wife, proceeds to pluck those very eyes out of the man’s head with a tablespoon, then you’ll know that this is a film that has started as it means to go on. The fact that it goes on for 169 minutes which sees the boy met even more misfortune and torturous savagery before the credits roll implies something an endurance test for an audience – an endurance test I admittedly struggled greatly with.

I’m not alone either. The Painted Bird (which had its release postponed earlier this year thanks to Covid) had an interesting time on the festival circuit last year with reports of walkouts from audiences at the Venice, Toronto and London press screenings on account of its many brutal and unflinching sequences. Conversely, the film has also been said to have received a lengthy standing ovation at the Warsaw International Film Festival.

It’s perhaps fitting that Marhoul’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s 1965 novel of the same name is accompanied by such extreme feeling and controversy, given that similar reactions have dogged its source material since its publication fifty-five years ago. Kosiński, who is perhaps most famous for his novel Being There about a simple-minded, empty void of a man whose mistakenly leapt upon as a political prophet and was subsequently made into a movie starring Peter Sellers in 1979, had originally presented The Painted Bird as an autobiographical account of his own childhood during World War II. Indeed it is said that the author was actually approached to write the novel after regaling dinner guests with disturbing, macabre tales of living among rural Polish folk and hiding from the Nazis. In truth however, as biographers of Kosiński later found out, the author was fortunate enough to have spent his childhood with a Polish Catholic family and no mistreatment or abuse along the lines of those depicted in the novel had befallen him. For DG Myers, reviewing James Park Sloan’s biography of Kosiński, this fabrication of his life was “compensating for ‘the hollowness at the core of his being”, something that he shared in common with the protagonist of Being There, Chauncey Gardiner; “his whole life had become a race to fill in that hollow space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward upon himself like a burnt-out star”.

Further controversy also dogged Kosiński, The Painted Bird and his other works when accusations of plagiarism reared its head. The American writer Eliot Weinberger claimed that Kosiński was not fluent enough in the English language to pen The Painted Bird in the mid sixties. Likewise, a 1982 Village Voice article alleged that Kosiński not only liberally stole from Polish texts unfamiliar to English readers (Being There bears a striking resemblance to Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz’s 1932 novel, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma) but that he also employed several ‘ghost writers’ to actually oen his bestselling novels, which accounted for the wildly different styles. The New York poet George Reavey claimed to have written The Painted Bird, whilst rumours abound that Kosiński was little more than a CIA stooge, presumably signifying to those behind the Iron Curtain that acclaim and riches were possible in the West.

The film, like the novel itself, takes its name from a metaphorical sequence that is as brutal and cruel as any of the events which surround it. Our unnamed boy protagonist (a superlative performance from Petr Kotlár) has fallen in with an elderly bird breeder who has decided to release a bird back to nature. Before throwing it up into the sky he proceeds, under the boy’s watchful and curious gaze, to daub the bird’s wings white. The bird rejoins the flock, but its difference is perceived as a threat. Mistaken for an outsider, the flock circle the newcomer and attack it, tearing it to pieces. Eventually, the bird plummets back to earth, to the old man’s amusement and the boy’s incomprehension and sadness. The metaphor here is that the boy is a Jew (or a gypsy) WWII-torn Eastern Europe and, as such, will never truly be welcomed by anyone he comes into contact with. He will always be viewed as an outsider and he will always be met with unspeakable cruelty as those around him attempt to protect themselves – a small scale litany of horror that echoes the greater inhumanity of the holocaust.

The trouble with this metaphor, and the scene itself, is that it comes about an hour into The Painted Bird‘s runtime, meaning that you’ve grasped all you need to know from the film within sixty minutes… and there are almost another two hours to go. As a result of making its point so swiftly, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the rest of the film was little more than a catalogue of misery and horror. The relentless depiction of man’s inhumanity to man becomes a numbing experience and a laborious chore as Kotlár’s odyssey sees him connect with a new sadist every fifteen minutes or so (Interestingly, one of the film’s rare, kind souls is actually a Nazi officer played by Stellan Skarsgård, who allows the boy to make good his escape from the train set for a concentration camp). By the time he’s repeatedly raped by Julian Sands’ pederast – in a sequence that sees Harvey Keitel as a priest, heavily (and distractingly) dubbed in the anonymous Interslavic language – and Sands is eaten alive in a pit of rats before Kotlár is thrown into a septic tank (no, I’m really not making any of these circles of hell up!) I’d all but given up.

The Painted Bird is an unremittingly harrowing movie that, perversely, approaches its horror in a manner that is ultimately emotionally disengaging. I can appreciate that the film is very artfully done – there’s a beauty to the bleakness on display, thanks to Vladimír Smutný’s black and white cinematography – but when you’re left numbed by the litany of barbarism and violent vignettes on display, precisely because they are so relentless, then I cannot consider The Painted Bird as a film that achieved its intentions. Like the novel itself, Marhoul’s film is set to become a talking point of wildly differing opinions.

Thanks for reading our review of The Painted Bird

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