Mark Reviews Movies: THE PAINTED BIRD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 16, 2020

A young boy encounters misery after misery (after misery, etc.) in The Painted Bird. The film, writer/director Václav Marhoul's adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel, is smartly and, at times, beautifully crafted, which at least makes its horrors slightly bearable.

In the early stages of the film, we get glimpses of some point behind the boy's endless suffering, as assorted people reflexively blame him for their own problems or ones beyond their capacity to comprehend. These are seemingly ordinary people, but the times, in the midst of World War II, have either transformed them or revealed the cruelty that was always there, waiting for a reason or an excuse to emerge.

The story's most daring element is that, despite the obvious villains causing death and destruction across Eastern Europe, the boy's tormentors are made up of a group of such allegedly ordinary people. He has two direct encounters with Nazis over the lengthy course of this story, and both times, the boy is spared by those men, likely the result of only a matter of chance.

To be clear, the film doesn't undermine the atrocities of the Nazis, since one of his "rescuers" executes a prisoner just before letting the boy free (not to mention the slaughter of people trying to escape a train heading toward a concentration camp). It's simply that this story is more about that very real concept of the "banality of evil" than it is about the widely accepted, patently obvious forms of it.

Suffering for the boy (played by Petr Kotlár), whose name isn't revealed until the film's final shot (It only matters because of the question of how much of a person exists by the end of this), begins immediately. He is being chased through the forest, clinging to a weasel, by other boys. They tackle him, punch out his front teeth, and proceed to burn the animal alive.

His stern aunt Marta (Nina Shunevych), with whom the boy is living during his parents' unexplained absence (although the reason, on our part, is easily assumed), shows her nephew no pity or sympathy. It is, she says, his fault for daring to leave the safety of her farm.

Such blame becomes a trend in the boy's experience. His aunt dies, leaving him to wander the countryside looking for a place to call home. Upon his arrival in a small village, the townsfolk set upon him. They are convinced this stranger is the cause of a fast-spreading illness, which is killing their livestock.

A healer (played by Alla Sokolova) "confirms" her neighbors' suspicions and then takes the boy as a servant. As the deaths mount, the boy is forced out of town, only to find himself caught in the middle of a love triangle at the home and workshop of an abusive miller (played by Udo Kier). He is convinced the boy will be a curse. Like so many of the superstitious and violent and malicious people in this tale, the miller is unable or unwilling to recognize that the boy isn't the issue. It is, like all the rest, the man himself.

This pattern—of the boy finding a new "caretaker," with each chapter announced by the name or names of them, and then being expelled or expelling himself from the resulting trouble—repeats itself over the course of the film's nearly three-hour run time. It is, quite intentionally, an ordeal to experience.

Even the "good" people here are not without fault. A kindly priest (played by Harvey Keitel, distractingly dubbed) cannot see the boy's suffering, and a Soviet sniper (played by Barry Pepper, in a standout performance of quiet stillness), who takes care of the boy with no benefit to himself, massacres several unarmed people in a village.

Such relative decency toward the child is the exception (The boy himself undergoes a severe change in how he treats others, too). For the most part, there is rampant physical abuse, which twice becomes sexual (The boy, obviously, is the victim, and Marhoul makes the strange, questionable choice of obscuring the abuse in one section while portraying it in the other). There are also as moments of horrifying violence, such as when that love triangle is resolved with a spoon and a dreadful scene in which a woman, who possibly suffers from mental illness, is viciously violated with a glass bottle.

If there's another and equally unmistakable pattern within the boy's journey of pain and misery, it is the simple fact that he is so ill-treated because he is perceived as different. The title here comes from an episode during which the boy stays with Lekh (Lech Dyblik), who keeps and sells birds. He paints one, as a flock of its kind approaches in the sky, and upon being released and returning to its fellow flyers, the painted bird, knowing it belongs but being perceived as an outsider, is pecked and pummeled in mid-air.

At various times, the boy, whose ethnicity is kept almost as hidden as his name until the story's final stretch, is seen as a member of the Romani people, Jewish, or something else that paints him as an unwanted outsider for so many. That attitude, perhaps, is at the cold, unflinching core of the film's observations of banal evil. For each of the Nazis who allows the boy to live, there are dozens of supposedly regular people who are willing to exploit, degrade, kill, or leave this child to die. The Nazis didn't come to power in isolation. They were able to rise because their evil beliefs were a reflection of those held by many, ostensibly "ordinary" people.

The Painted Bird is almost too much to take, given the relatively straightforward simplicity of its message. Marhoul, though, does provide us plenty of time and opportunity to reflect upon the story's patterns of fear and hatred, and they are almost as ugly and disquieting as the more overt horrors on display.

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