End of Year MOVIE JOURNAL

[Chris Knipp]

THE PAINTED BIRD (Václav Marhoul 2019). Czech director Václav Marhoul's remarkable adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's controversial Sixties work is a devastating WWII version of a picaresque novel. It follows a boy from 1939 to 1945, ages six to twelve in an "inter-slavic" invented language to avoid saddling any one Eastern European country with the horrors that occur - too horrible to be taken literally, but how can they be taken otherwise? Through it all the mostly mute boy (Petr Kotlar) is impassive, while seeing eyes gauged out, being beaten, buried up to the neck to be pecked at by crows, be the object of rural sex perverts and a sadistic pedophile, dumped in a manure pit, taught revenge by an ace sniper, put in an orphanage, then, at last, retrieved by his father, whom he may not want to forgive. Gorgeous black and white cinematography helps distance us from the ugliness. The source may have been plagiarized but Marhoul has made it his own. With Udo Kier, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, and Barry Popper, among others. This is coming out early next year. Watched on a screener. When the film was released at Venice 14 people are said to have walked out in shock. Metascore 75%. 169 mins.