He can count your teeth!
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...
#39 : Nabarvené ptáče (The Painted Bird)
Adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s second world war novel, following a young Jewish boy’s attempts to survive in Poland after his parents are taken to a concentration camp, filmed in gruesome, harrowing detail.
So, if I thought the last film was hard work, what exactly was I going to think about this one? A black-and-white East European film which is 168 minutes long and The Guardian described as a "gruelling descent into the hell of wartime" - and they liked it! Other less serious newspapers decided to kick up a fuss about how depraved the whole thing was, safe in the knowledge that none of their readers would ever bother watching it. Yes, slightly snobby I know, but I bet only 2 Guardian readers have watched it as well - and I'm one of them. Amusingly, IMDB includes the takings for the opening weekend in the US - it managed a grand total of $452.
So, what do you need to know about this film? Well, it's unremittingly grim. Annnnd, we're done here...
OK, so the director has an eye for both the detailed and the wide shot. And the location scout earned every penny finding places that looked like utter shitholes (although I suspect this was mostly because they were, in fact, utter shitholes). The casting agent also did a great job - assuming they were told "just find as many ugly people as you can". The acting is fine I guess - a lot of it involves staring into the distance in a stereotypical black-and-white East European film manner, but Petr Kotlár deserves a special mention for maintaining a deadpan expression throughout all the madness that goes on around him. The dialogue falls into the "not dreadful" category but only because there's so little of it - and I'm really not kidding here. Huge swathes of the film go by with one or two lines a minute and there was an 8 minute stretch I noticed with no dialogue at all (and it wouldn't surprise me if there was a longer one than I just didn't notice)
But, all you really need to know is that this film is totally, completely, 100% grim. And a lot of it makes absolutely no sense. Why did they kidnap his ferret and burn it alive? Why did they bury him up to his neck and let the crows could peck his head? Why do two cats having sex make that guy gouge the other guy's eyes out with a spoon? Why does the naked woman give the ugly old guy a bird in order to have sex with him? Why does the entire village throw him in a muddy well for dropping a bible? Why did she pretend to have sex with a goat? And why did that make him cut its head off and throw it at her? Just WHY?!?!
And I'm not even going to talk about the grimmest scene - it was just, shall we say, really not very nice at all. Another thing I'd say is that the random nature of a lot of the cruelty makes the Nazis' behaviour (mostly "only" machine gunning down innocent civilians) seem quite "normal" - which I struggle to imagine was really anyone's plan.
So to lighten the mood, let me give you a fascinating fact - Wikipedia tells me this is "the first film to feature the Intraslavic language" - I bet you didn't know that now, did you? Another very odd fact is that the author of the book on which the film is based also wrote Being There, which was made into a film with Peter Sellars (and is thematically and tonally approximately a million miles away from this film). There - that's lightened the mood, hasn't it?
So, obviously I hated this film - however, I would also say that surprisingly I found it considerably less hard work that the previous film. There was just very little tension in this film (you knew everyone was either going to be mad or an utter bastard - there was no surprise to it) and, although I said I didn't empathise with the characters in the previous film, in this film I actively didn't care what happened to them. I just found myself waiting for the next random act of grimness just so I could shake my head at it, make a note of it and move on. I would however, for the removal of doubt, like to restate that I hated this film and I'm not recommending it in the slightest - just avoid it. Seriously, you'll thank me for it.
At the time of writing, this film is available to rent on various streaming services but I can't for the life of me imagine why you'd want to do such a thing.
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