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The Painted Bird review: steel yourself for a brutal, beautiful act of cinematic flagellation

Stellan Skarsgård in The Painted Bird
Stellan Skarsgård in The Painted Bird
  • Dir: Václav Marhoul; Cast: Petr Kotlár, Harvey Keitel, Barry Pepper, Julian Sands, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgård, Aleksey Kravchenko. 18 cert, 170 mins

The Painted Bird starts as it means to continue – with something truly horrible happening in black-and-white. Somewhere in war-torn Eastern Europe – we’re never exactly sure where – a young boy is running through woodland from a gang of tormentors. They jump on him, wrest his pet ferret away, and douse it with gasoline.

This lad, whose three-hour ordeal is only just beginning, is forced to watch the poor creature as it’s set on fire, running around in small circles, screeching out its agonising death throes.

Cruelty – mainly man’s towards man, but with random targets in the natural world thrown in for good measure – is the overriding keynote of this film, an adaptation of the 1965 novel by Being There’s author, the Polish-American Jerzy Kosinski. With its chest-puffing runtime and bleakly gorgeous, award-worthy photography, it’s straining awfully hard to be a gruelling masterpiece and isn’t, quite.

It rubs our faces too ostentatiously in the depravity of wartime experience; it’s relentless, and sometimes nearly unbearable. But it’s a long way from negligible, too – and for all its overworked grotesqueries, it attempts an intriguing climb from the deepest pits of horror towards some kind of stoic grace.

The boy (an indefatigable Petr Kotlár) is brutally shuttled from one hovel and cheerless village to the next, experiencing a catalogue of barbaric mistreatments. No one who shows him kindness hangs around very long. He’s repeatedly cast out as some kind of Jonah figure, and handed over as an appeasement gesture to the Germans, who identify him as Jewish. (In the novel, Kosinski’s narrator denied this.)

Other Jewish prisoners succeed in leaping from a transport train, but are mown down in a meadow, their bodies plundered. Only thanks to the silent mercy of a Wehrmacht officer is the boy given a chance to escape.

The officer is none other than Stellan Skarsgård, one of a handful of recognisable faces who arrive at regular intervals, providing possible hope in the darkness – the theoretical sanctuary of a redemptive star cameo. Harvey Keitel is a benign but ailing priest – dubbed, unlike Julian Sands, who seems to have a go at his own Czech dialogue, but also plays a sadistic paedophile posing as a devout churchgoer.

“He’ll only bring misfortune,” says an old miller to his wife, who dresses the boy up in the rags of their dead son. You know you’re in trouble when it’s weird-cinema icon Udo Kier making this prediction. Yep, within five minutes he’s gone insane, accused his right-hand-man of coveting the wife, and gouged out this man’s eyeballs with a spoon, to become snacks for a pair of rutting cats under the table.

In every way, be prepared. The fates awaiting some of the film’s other madmen, perverts and nymphomaniacs are tough enough to describe, let alone watch. Unlike them, the boy manages to avoid being dragged into any pits of starving rats, or having a milk bottle kicked up a body cavity. But he does get thrown into raw sewage as penance for being a clumsy altar boy – enough to make him almost miss the visually sublime tableau when was buried up to his neck in gravel that one time, and had his scalp gnawed by vicious ravens.

Harvey Keitel in The Painted Bird
Harvey Keitel in The Painted Bird

The film’s most imaginative sequence puts the title to metaphorical work. Without speaking, a grizzled farmer daubs a small bird with white paint and releases it to join a flock in the sky. The others all turn on it, whirling and lacerating until it drops to the ground, like a stone. The boy picks up its broken remains and tenderly strokes it, crying. It’s a scene of terrible beauty – the film’s distilled kernel of allegory, which lingers in the mind through all the episodes of persecution, slut-shaming, and fiery pillaging that follow.

As a kind of hellish pastoral, The Painted Bird is rampantly over-the-top, and will be most people’s idea of, well, hell. It doesn’t have the strict formal control of, say, Son of Saul, László Nemes’s Oscar-winning Auschwitz parable, even if both films belong to a clear lineage of cinematic flagellation enfolding the entire works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, as well as Come and See (1985), Elem Klimov’s legendarily hard-going epic about the Nazi occupation of Belarus through the eyes of a boy.

The Painted Bird’s Czech director, Václav Marhoul, points us deliberately towards the Klimov film by casting that very boy – Aleksey Kravchenko, now 50 – in the small role of a sympathetic Red Army officer, alongside a quietly terrific Barry Pepper as a sniper called Mitka, who shows no mercy in a methodical revenge spree, picking off a whole village of mutinous locals while the boy spectates.

Joska – for such is the name he scrawls, pugnaciously, on a window in the last shot – learns among these grim survival lessons a hardened philosophy of tit-for-tat. He won’t lie down and be anyone’s victim, anyone’s painted bird, any more. These rites of passage could hardly be happening in a more pitiless historical context. But his will to stagger away from every sling and arrow the film fires at him? It has a lingering power – even a nobility.

In cinemas and on BFI player, Amazon Prime and Curzon Home Cinema from Friday