BLOOD LANDS
34 | Sight&Sound | April 2020INTOLERABLE CRUELTY
Petr Kotlar as Joska, in
The Painted Bird, which
encapsulates the experience
of living in what historian
Timothy Snyder calls ‘the
bloodlands’, from central
Poland to eastern Russia
and incorporating Ukraine,
Belarus and the Baltic StatesVáclav Marhoul’s ‘The Painted Bird’, a searing portrait of a boy trapped in the violence of
Eastern Europe during WWII, joins a brave lineage of films exploring the experience of
conflict in the region, from ‘Ivan’s Childhood’ to ‘Come and See’. By Michael BrookeC
zech director Václav Marhoul was far from
the obvious candidate to attempt the first
translation into film of The Painted Bird, Jerzy
Kosinski’s notorious 1965 novel set in an unspecified
war-ravaged Eastern European country during World
War II. Marhoul had just two feature films behind
him – the Raymond Chandler-inspired slapstick farce
Smart Philip (2003) and the war film Tobruk (2008),
about Czechoslovak soldiers on the front line of the
Allies’ North African campaign. Which explains
some of the shock that greeted its September 2019
world premiere at the Venice Film Festival: this was
undoubtedly a major film by a serious artist, with the
work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr frequently
cited as legitimate comparators. But the bulk of the
reaction, including numerous walkouts, was linked
to the film’s content. The narrative follows a youngboy as he travels through a hellscape bearing witness
to, and often being the target of, set pieces as violent
as anything in recent cinema. (The 102-day shoot
spanned 18 months, a pre-planned special effect that
enabled lead actor Petr Kotlar to visibly age over the
course of the film.) Few current films have been more
deserving of an 18 certificate, and anyone even slight-
ly squeamish should approach with extreme caution.
Although it was perhaps inevitable that the film
would be repeatedly described as “Václav Marhoul’s
Holocaust epic”, the director himself is at pains to
play this down. And indeed the events labelled ‘the
Holocaust’ – the pre-planned, mechanised slaughter
of millions of people – comprise a comparatively
small proportion of his film’s 169 minutes. People
clearly en route to a Nazi extermination camp
attempt an escape, and a numerical camp tattoo