REVIEWS
72 | Sight&Sound | April 2019Reviewed by Kate Stables
Seizing the opportunity to combine a British
community comedy with the crowd-pleasing
power of the 2011 BBC show The Choir: Military
Wives, Peter Cattaneo’s feelgood fictionalisation
of the singing group’s formation makes for a
heartwarming if predictable dramedy. With its
disparate ensemble of anxious garrison wives
finding solidarity through song while their spouses
are deployed in Afghanistan, it’s a regendered
kissing cousin to Cattaneo’s 1997 hit The Full Monty.
Sharp use of telling details immerses us in
the women’s nervy days, but Rosanne Flynn
and Rachel Tunnard’s script strains to land its
compensatory laughs, too busy manufacturing
rivalry between the choir’s leaders – brittle,
bereaved Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) and laidback
Lisa (Sharon Horgan). Touching in its pathos
when a new wife is crushed by her husband’s
death in combat, the film defaults to TV-movie
sentimentality for Kate’s shopaholic stiff-upper-
lip grief and Lisa’s clashes with her wild-child
teenager. Scott Thomas’s understated performance,
tense with misery under upper-class bossiness,
piques the viewer’s curiosity, but Horgan’s
alternating anxiety and amiable sarcasm are
familiar from shows from Pulling to Catastrophe.
While Kate and Lisa’s choir-mates are
one-note characters, the group’s gradual
transformation from warbling uncertainty to
a confident a cappella version of Yazoo’s ‘Only
You’ and an ethereal ‘Ave Maria’ is engaging,
as their emotional unity mirrors their vocal
harmony. If the ‘big performance in jeopardy’
plot twist feels a tad manipulative, the choir’s
homemade power ballad, created from soldiers’
letters, doesn’t leave a dry eye anywhere.Military Wives
United Kingdom 2019
Director: Peter Cattaneo
Certificate 12A 112m 40sUK, 2009. Military wives with spouses in Afghanistan
form a choir. The choir leaders, bossy Kate and easy-
going Lisa, bicker constantly. Despite a disastrous
local concert, they are booked to perform at the
UK military’s Festival of Remembrance. When choir
member Sarah’s husband is killed, Sarah stops the
others cancelling the concert. Kate quits hours
before the festival, angered at Lisa’s use of her family
memory in their song. She relents and dashes to join
the successful performance. Kate and Lisa reconcile.Produced by
Ben Pugh
Rory Aitken
Producer
Piers Tempest
Written by
Rachel Tunnard
Rosanne Flynn
Director of
Photography
Hubert Taczanowski
Edited by
Lesley Walker
Anne Sopel
Production
Designer
John Beard
Original Score
Lorne Balfe
Production
Sound Mixer
Paul Paragon
Costume Designer
Jill Taylor
©Military Wives
Choir Film LtdProduction
Companies
Ingenious Media
presents in
association with
Embankment Films
a 42 Production in
association with
Tempo Productions
Executive
Producers
Zygi Kamasa
Peter Touche
Tim Haslam
Hugo Grumbar
Josh Varney
Liz Gallacher
Stephen Spence
Emma Berkofsky
Josh Horsfield
Jo Bamford
Orlando Wood
Hana Canter
Emma Willis
Rene BessonCast
Kristin Scott
Thomas
Kate
Sharon Horgan
Lisa
Amy James-Kelly
Sarah
Lara Rossi
Ruby
Gaby French
Jess
Emma Lowndes
Annie
India Amarteifio
Frankie
Laura Checkley
Maz
Jason Flemyng
Crooks
Greg Wise
Richard
In Colour
Distributor
Lionsgate UKCredits and SynopsisReviewed by Kim Newman
Czech writer-director Václav
Marhoul is drawn to literary
classics of innocence lost
in wartime – his Tobruk
(2008) transposed Stephen
Crane’s American Civil War classic The Red
Badge of Courage to North Africa during World
War II. Here, he tackles Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965
novel, long deemed unfilmable for its Cannibal
Ferox-level of sexualised ultraviolence against
children (also men, women and animals). A
caption insists young actor Petr Kotlar was
replaced by adult doubles during tactfully
filmed scenes in which the lost boy is raped
by a moonshine-manufacturer (Julian Sands)
and a woman called Labina (Julia Valentova).
Like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kosinski’s
novel has a narrator who speaks eloquently to the
reader but refuses to talk with almost everyone
else. Marhoul doesn’t use voiceover, putting the
strain on an array of guest performers – a range
of international faces speaking a patchwork of
dubbed languages – who deliver harsh lessons.
Harvey Keitel and Udo Kier, players with track
records in transgressive cinema, appear as a dying
priest and an eye-gouging miller – while Sands’sultimate fate, eaten off screen by rats, is a gloss on
his role as Dario Argento’s Phantom of the Opera.
The Boy – analogous to a bird whose wings are
blotched with paint, pecked to death by a suddenly
hostile flock – is marked as a victim even without
the war. In fact, he is treated more kindly by
soldiers – a Nazi (Stellan Skarsgård) lets him go, a
Soviet sniper (Barry Pepper) gives him a gun – than
by a whole range of people who might usually
be seen as the victims of war, set against him not
because he’s a Jew (often assumed, never quite
confirmed) but because he’s Not From Around
Here and thus fair game. A witch who buys him
as a slave even declares that he’s a vampire.
In an opening scene – invented by Marhoul
and guaranteed to send some audiences out of
the cinema before the film s under way – some
bullies burn the Boy’s pet ferret alive, without
even the excuse of needing it for food. This marks
The Painted Bird as perhaps the anti-Jojo Rabbit, a
child’s fantasy of WWII as a series of lessons in
blank cruelty. Shooting in lush monochrome
widescreen that pastiches Sven Nykvist’s work
with Ingmar Bergman, Marhoul approaches
the story with a stately, episodic pace that spins
a 222-page fast read into nearly three hours of
beautiful if ultimately crushing horrors.The Painted Bird
Czech Republic/Ukraine/Slovakia 2019
Director: Václav Marhoul
Certificate 18 169m 33sRural Eastern Europe, World War II. When the elderly
woman with whom he has been left dies, a boy suffers
under a succession of variously abusive or exploitative
carers. Though he can speak, he seldom does. A kindly
priest entrusts him to Garbos, a moonshiner, who
repeatedly rapes him. The boy tricks Garbos into
falling into an abandoned bunker full of hungry rats.
Labina, a woman who uses the boy as a sex slave, isalso sleeping with her goat, which he beheads before
running off. Mitka, a Russian soldier, gives him a gun,
which he uses to murder a market trader who has
beaten him. Nikodem, the boy’s father, is released from
a concentration camp and finds him in an orphanage.
The boy refuses to speak with Nikodem or admit he
remembers his parents. While Nikodem sleeps, the
boy writes his name – Joska – on a train window.Produced by
Václav Marhoul
Screenplay
Václav Marhoul
Based on the
novel written by
Jerzy Kosinski
Director of
Photography
Vladimír Smutný
Editor
Ludek Hudec
Production Designer
Jan Vlasák
Sound Designer
Pavel RejholecCostume Designer
Helena Rovna
Stunt Co-ordinator
Jiri Kraus
©Silver Screen, Ceská
televize, Eduard
& Milada Kucera,
Directory Films,
Rozhlas a televízia
Slovenska, Certicon
Group, Innogy, Pubres,
Richard Kaucky
Production
Companies
Co-producers: Ceskátelevize, Eduard
& Milada Kucera,
Directory Films,
Rozhlas a televízia
Slovenska, Certicon
Group, Innogy,
Pubres, Richard
Kaucky, Monte
Rosso Production
Co-funded by Czech
Incentive SchemeCast
Petr Kotlar
JoskaNina Shunevych
Marta
Alla Sokolova
Olga
Udo Kier
miller
Michaela Dolezalova
miller’s wife
Zdenek Pecha
labourer
Lech Dyblik
Lekh
Jitka Cvancarová
Ludmila
Stellan Skarsgård
HansHarvey Keitel
priest
Julian Sands
Garros
Julia Valentova
Vidrnakova
Labina
Aleksey Kravchenko
Gavrila
Barry Pepper
Mitka
Petr Vanek
Nikodem
Dolby Atmos
In Black & White[2.35:1]
Subtitles
Distributor
Eureka
Entertainment Ltd
Czech Republic
theatrical title
Nabarvené ptáceFear eats the soul: Petr KotlarCredits and SynopsisSee Feature
on page 34