Brace yourself for a beautiful, brutal cinematic experience
The Painted Bird 18 cert, 170 min ★★★★★
Dir Václav Marhoul
Starring Petr Kotlár, Harvey Keitel, Barry Pepper, Julian Sands, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgård, Aleksey Kravchenko
The Painted Bird starts as it means to continue – with something truly horrible happening in black-and-white. Somewhere in war-torn Eastern Europe – we’re never exactly sure where – a young boy is running through woodland from a gang of tormentors. They jump on him, wrest his pet ferret away, and douse it with petrol.
This lad, whose three-hour ordeal is only just beginning, is forced to watch the poor creature as it’s set on fire, running around in small circles in its agonising death throes.
Cruelty – mainly man’s towards man, but with random targets in the natural world thrown in for good measure – is the overriding keynote of this film, an adaptation of the 1965 novel by Being There’s author, the Polish-american Jerzy Kosinski.
With its chest-puffing runtime and bleakly gorgeous, award-worthy photography, it’s straining awfully hard to be a gruelling masterpiece and isn’t, quite. It rubs our faces too ostentatiously in the depravity of wartime experience.
But it’s a long way from negligible, too – and for all its overworked grotesqueries, this hellish pastoral attempts an intriguing climb from the deepest pits of horror towards some kind of stoic grace.
The boy (an indefatigable Petr Kotlár) is brutally shuttled from one hovel and cheerless village to the next. No one who shows him kindness hangs around very long. He’s repeatedly cast out as some kind of Jonah figure, and handed over to the Germans, who identify him as Jewish. (In the novel, Kosinski’s narrator denied this.)
Other Jewish prisoners succeed in leaping from a transport train, but are mown down in a meadow, their bodies plundered. Only thanks to the silent mercy of a Wehrmacht officer is the boy given a chance to escape.
The officer is none other than Stellan Skarsgård, one of a handful of recognisable faces who arrive at regular intervals, providing possible hope – the theoretical sanctuary of a redemptive star cameo. Harvey Keitel is a benign but ailing priest, while Julian Sands plays a sadistic paedophile posing as a devout churchgoer.
In every way, be prepared: the fates awaiting some of the film’s madmen, perverts and nymphomaniacs are tough enough to describe, let alone watch.
The film’s most imaginative sequence puts the title to metaphorical work. A grizzled farmer daubs a small bird with white paint and releases it to join a flock in the sky. The others turn on it until it drops to the ground, like a stone. The boy picks up its broken remains and tenderly strokes it, crying. It’s a scene of terrible beauty – the film’s distilled kernel of allegory, which lingers in the mind through all the persecution, slut-shaming, and fiery pillaging that follow.
The Painted Bird’s Czech director, Václav Marhoul, points us deliberately towards the earlier, comparable, Come and See, Elem Klimov’s 1985 epic about the Nazi occupation of Belarus through the eyes of a boy.
It also casts that very boy – Aleksey Kravchenko, now 50 – in the small role of a sympathetic Red Army officer, alongside a quietly terrific Barry Pepper as a sniper called Mitka, who shows no mercy in a methodical revenge spree.
Joska – for such is the name the boy scrawls, pugnaciously, on a window in the last shot – learns a hardened philosophy of tit-for-tat. He won’t lie down and be anyone’s victim, anyone’s painted bird, any more.
These rites of passage could hardly be happening in a more pitiless historical context. But his will to stagger away from every sling and arrow the film fires at him? It has a lingering power – even a nobility.
In cinemas and on BFI player from today