‘The Painted Bird’: A Shocking, Empty and Self-Important Holocaust Movie [Review]

Movies about World War II can be brutal, especially if they are set in rural-ravaged Eastern Europe and have a child protagonist rummaging through the chaos. There’s always been something about that time and setting that exudes total and utter dread. The most well-known examples would be “Come and See,” and Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” which set the bar quite high.

As brutal as that setup may sound, one cannot prepare you for the hard-to-watch experience that is director Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird.” A movie filled with indelibly bleak moments, many of which involve extremely violent acts being committed, but, unlike the aforementioned classics, Marhoul’s film somehow never transcends its shocks and never quite finds deeper meaning in the drama.

Based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel of the same name, the film has a young Jewish boy wandering through a dehumanized Eastern Europe during World War II. Shot in 35mm black and white, the strange episodic journey this orphaned boy takes on is filled with people whose moral and ethical compasses have been stripped off by the ravages of war. It also doesn’t help that many civilians in Poland, Russia and much of the Soviet block at the time were anti-semitic and laid down their frustrations on the Jewish populace surrounding them.

The orphaned young Jewish protagonist of the story (known only as The Boy), whose aunt has just died and is left alone to fend for himself, goes through an odyssey of incidents, all shot in pristine 35 mm film. Despite the multitude of shocking moments, there are quiet passages as well, as he wanders through an Odyssey-like journey filled with forestry.

The people he encounters along the way are a depiction of pure evil: a sorceress, a pedophile, a woman beater and many more insidious characters. Particularly memorable, maybe for the wrong reasons, is an abusive husband, played by Udo Kier, who uses a spoon to gouge out the eyes of a local farmer who he believes had sex with his wife. It all ends with the cat licking the eyeballs on the floor. Another particularly gruesome episode involves a town nymph being horrifically lynched and penetrated with a glass bottle by a group of village women who are angry that she slept with their men.

This vision of wartime horror starts with shocks and ends with shocks. Maybe Marhoul wants us not to rest easy throughout the film’s near-three hour runtime so as to be pummeled by the film’s climax and feel the same numbness to violence as our protagonist must feel. However, the more the film goes along, the more we start not caring for the outcome.

First-time actor Petr Kotlar might be a good child actor, but he can’t seem to find the screen presence necessitated to make us care about this boy. Even when a Russian division takes him in as refuge and he is mentored under the wing of a sniper played by Barry Pepper, there is a feeling of detachment and overall impassiveness on our part.

If it was Marhoul’s goal to push and provoke, then he has somewhat succeeded in that, but the dramatic stakes in “The Painted Bird” feel so begging and riddled with contrivances that one does begin to ask what the point of it all was. [C]