The Painted Bird is an unforgettable, soul-crushing, and essential tour through fascism’s madness
will make you miserable. Watching it is akin to chugging back the black ooze that pumps through humanity’s dark heart, swallowing the vile and toxic swill hard, and asking for more, and more and more until 2 hours 49 minutes have elapsed. But sometimes we need to feel awful. Sometimes we need to face the world at its worst.
Marhoul seems to grudgingly recognize his film’s digestibility issues, as he breaks up his adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s acclaimed, problematic 1965 novel into several short chapters: Each new instalment is titled with the names of the men and women who a young unnamed Jewish boy encounters as he wanders through an anonymous Eastern European country. But this episodic construction is the director’s first and last concession to easing audiences into a tale of war and madness.
Occasionally, the boy encounters a kind or sympathetic figure, such as the ailing priest who attempts to convert the child or the lonely bird keeper who teaches the boy a dangerous but important life lesson, but they are either dispatched with quickly or are so blind to the perversions of their fellow man that their actions place the boy in mortal jeopardy many times over. Very quickly, the boy – and the audience – accept that there is no actual escape.
Shot on crisp 35 mm film, the picture possesses an undeniable sense of black-and-white grandeur, allowing the cheerless, plundered landscape to look paradoxically beautiful. Meanwhile, the subtitles’ font size is so tiny that the dialogue is barely visible at all, which is either an acknowledgement that words mean nothing in wartime, or that if you need to look at the darkness of our world, then you best look as hard as you possibly can.
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