THE PEASANTS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Peasants, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

There's an unreal quality to The Peasants that undermines the harsh reality of its tale. This is to be expected, perhaps, given the formal mode and medium of married co-writers/co-directors DK and Hugh Welchman's movie. It's a meticulously animated piece, composed of almost two hours' worth of oil paintings assembled frame by frame to provide movement and the spark of life.

The task could not have been an easy one. Indeed, the movie took five years to produce in this manner, and some footage playing the credits shows a couple of the production's artists at work, using filmed footage of actors as reference to fill a canvas with eerily realistic replicas of the people and Impressionistic backdrops.

Watching the finished product, one might think there was some form of rotoscoping happening (either by way of tracing or some post-production visual effects, like a filter on a digital photograph), considering the sheer level of detail in the figures' faces. No, these artists worked mostly by eye and by hand, although one has to imagine—or just hope—that some understandable corners were cut with a little bit of tracing here or there.

Even the slight hint of the amount of work that had to have gone into the making of this movie gives one a deep appreciation and admiration for the artists who made it possible. This isn't the first time these two filmmakers have taken on a project so ambitious, either. Their previous movie was a biography of Vincent van Gogh, presented by way of the same technique and styled after the artist's own paintings. In that case, the style made sense. In this one, it results in a distancing and distracting effect that's impossible to ignore.

Some of that is the technique itself, used to create images that so closely resemble real-life people in motion. It often comes across as blurry and, when there's a lot of movement involved, produces an oddly vertiginous effect, as the eyes and the brain adjust, not only to the uncanniness of seeing a person who looks real but decidedly isn't, but also to the slight imperfections/misalignments between the images of each frame. One imagines that a still of any single frame here would be worthy of a prominent spot on a wall, but the combination of them is harshly rough at times and generally difficult to track visually.

Most of the issue with this technique in this particular instance, though, is the disconnect between it and the story itself. That tale comes from an early 20th century novel by Wladyslaw Reymont, and it's a slice-of-life tale about the residents of a small Polish village during that same era. There is nothing fantastical about it, save for a couple of metaphorical moments of nature, so the straightforward realism of the story and the blatantly stylized presentation clash on a foundational level.

It's set in the village of Lipce, where people mostly farm and depend on nature, as well as this agricultural balance between the residents and the land, to live. The main character is Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska, in voice and artistic reproduction, as with the rest of the case), a young woman who wants her life to be of her own design—despite the pressures of society around her. The conflict begins when Jagna's widowed mother Marcjanna (Ewa Kasprzyk) insists that her daughter marry—and marry well. Jagna, though, wants to find love, and if the rumors in town are to be believed, she has attempted to do so with a few young men in the village.

One of them, for sure, is Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), the eldest son of Lipce's primary farmer Maciej Boryna (Miroslaw Baka), a widower who's stubborn and covetous of his position and all of the land he has accumulated over the decades. His adult children and their spouses want their slice of that acreage, so he comes up with a plan to legally hold on to it a while longer. It means courting Jagna, whose mother more or less forces her to accept, and marrying the young woman so that the land would pass to her, while he might better control this new heir in the meantime.

Most of this tale, then, is grounded in legal matters of land ownership and the melodrama of Jagna's potentially perilous situation. She's caught between two men—one, the husband whom she doesn't love but who could give her the practical wealth and status she has never known, and the other, the married man she loves and whose infatuation with her becomes obsessive and a threat to both of their respective positions in the family. If we can call an animated-painting replica of motion a performance, Urzedowska is a notable presence of rebellion here.

The question of performance, though, raises the key issue: None of this real, despite often looking that way within and beneath the layers of paint on screen. The focus becomes less on the characters, as well as the story, and more on how the filmmakers were able to pull off the movie's form.

The Peasants mostly leaves us wanting to learn about and see more of how these artists accomplished the project. It also leave us wondering why the filmmakers decided upon a technique that adds such a thick layer of distance between the audience and the narrative material.

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