Are we talking about the unspeakable? Witness the unbearable? Are we looking at the painted bird?
Since making his deyet last year at the Venice Film Festival, jerzy Kosi-ski’s adaptation of Czech filmmaker Véclav Marhoul from Jerzy Kosi-ski’s debatable 1965 World War II novel has been listed as one of the most heartbreaking tales of man’s ability for excessive cruelty ever filmed, and it is Not Unjustly Array Who Controlling to Approve one of their 3 screenings at the Toronto Film Festival in September past (another 40 people would have left at least one of them) were not only marked by the brutality depicted on the screen, but also questioned the price. to see it.
To put into attitude the barbarity and inhumanity that he witnesses and endures, the film begins with the child running through the forest with a possum puppy while being chased by a band of marauders who attack him and set fire to the animal; Apart from the time that the kid sometimes receives a pstyam of bread or a plate of cabbage soup, this is probably the worst thing he can think of in the film.
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The aunt with which she remains in a vain attempt to hide from the Russian Cossacks and the German SS tells her that the attack is her fault for being alone. Then, a few scenes later, she dies suddenly and she herself is engulfed in flames.
From there, the child wanders aimlessly from one unthinkable scenario to another. A healer buries him to his neck as the crows peck at his face. A guy pulls his diary away to hit him with a sharp stick because he thinks the kid’s Jewish.
A villager played Julian Sands torturing and raping him, one of the many examples of sexual violence in the film. By the time the boy was thrown into a manure well, he stopped talking completely. (The main language of the film is what the production calls Esperanto Slavic, which Marhoul used for the film not to blame a specific country for the atrocities described).
There are detained pieces: Jews fleeing trains bound for concentration camps to be shot in a camp, a horse-drawn raid through Russian infants that leaves almost each and every inhabitant of a village dead, who are as brilliantly designed and groomed as all action sequences. I’ve noticed it in the last few years. But this is not the kind of action we deserve to be comfortable with: those who suffer from violence are not fighting partners and many of those who suffer from it are young people and even babies.
The hero boy is not Huck Finn, with an untapped reserve of courage, cunning and kindness to persevere. He is corrupted by his reports and commits his own despicable acts. Your hero’s journey, if you have it, is back in the dark.
Similarly, while the film is breathtakingly cinematic, the scenes don’t build on each other towards an emotional catharsis the way they would in other movies. They are beautifully polished, stacked building blocks of inhumanity and evil, each worse than the next. If the images themselves were not so stunningly beautiful, they would be impossible to withstand, which leaves the viewer in an impossible moral quandary of being seduced by cinema to bear witness to starkly monochrome degeneracy.
Again: why bother? Why are you doing this?
In her old Trauma and Recovery study, Dr. Judith Herman wrote: “The study of mental trauma confronts human vulnerability in the herbal world and the capacity of evil in humans. He argues that even contemplating and discussing in public such acts of depravity and its effect on the human psyche is an act of political defiance.
Watching The Painted Bird and facing its horrors in the midst of the age of anxiety and agitation in which we live lately seems like an act of resistance. It is an opposing resistance to the complacency, forgetfulness and ethical relativism that has surrounded our national discourse. Moreover, it is the resistance to our own fragility and the concept that we “just manage it now”.
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