Review: The Painted Bird Is a Viscerally Haunting Evocation of the Toll of War

Joska (Petr Kotlár) doesn’t utter a word throughout The Painted Bird, writer-director Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s 1965 novel of the same name. But the boy does communicate through writing, if only twice across the film’s 169-minute running time. We first meet him as his parents drop him off at his aunt Marta’s (Nina Sunevic) rural home to supposedly shelter him from the ravages of war and anti-Semitism. There he sketches a drawing of his family with crayons, writing “Come Fetch Me” on it, as if guessing the unspeakable horrors that he will soon suffer. Then, in the film’s final moments, having undergone or witnessed what feels like every possible cruelty under the sun—impalement, dismemberment, incest, beastiality, a hanging suicide, and more—Joska uses his calloused fingers to finally tell us his name, writing it on a misty bus window.

The torments of this boy who remains unidentified to the strangers he meets mirrors Marhoul’s motivation to have his characters speak in Interslavic, a zonal constructed language, effectively giving the film a mythic aura. This could be anywhere, this could be any war, and this could be any child. The violence in The Painted Bird is too horrific to be ascribed to any one nation, or to even be named. It’s the violence of every nation, as comprehensive as language itself, and to assign that violence as a series of unfortunate events belonging to one nation, or one child, alone would be to betray that universality.

Though we understand the events in The Painted Bird to take place in the midst of World War II, Marhoul purposefully portrays the specificities of time and social-political context as marginal to the real drama of the film: the dehumanization of a child at the hands of every institution, from family to church to nation. If the child survives, and he does, it’s due to his refusal to be the heir of so much violence, withdrawing from speech but mastering the art of observation. Once Joska’s aunt dies, he roams the countryside and comes across strangers who take him in mostly to abuse him. He doesn’t speak, but he does listen. Honing his perception skills, his ability to read the world, doesn’t protect him from suffering, but it grants him survival, as he escapes from ferocious dogs, sadists, pedophiles, rapists, and SS officers.

The Painted Bird is packed with incident, but Marhoul is less concerned with developing a conventional plot than he is with situating Joska’s encounter in a perpetually metaphorical realm. It’s as if Joska is stuck inside a macabre fairy tale, with his attempts to exit from what seems like a bad dream only bringing him more misfortune. The film’s uncanny qualities are accentuated by Marhoul’s hyper-stylized mixing of certain noises—the hysteric chirping of crickets, the loud rubbing of the rusty chains of a kids swing set, and bare hands removing corn from a cob—embodying the distortions and hyperbole of a child’s memories and imagination. This isolation of one single sound in a scene that realistically would have been rife with many recalls another Czech film, Jan Švankmajer’s Little Otik, where the exaggeration of single aural elements in a scene conveys something at once childlike and uncanny.

This film’s luscious black-and-white imagery borrows from a variety of works that masterfully document existential misery. Scenes where Joska escapes through a birch forest evoke similar ones from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood. Other moments bear stunning resemblance to Béla Tarr’s visions of Eastern European gloom. A sequence where Joska walks alone and pauses to stare from outside at the tragic debauchery of adults dancing inside a tavern, as if petrified by the sight of the future that awaits him, borrows from one of the most gut-wrenching episodes from Sátántangó. In such moments, in Tarr and Marhoul’s universes alike, some drunkard inevitably plays a never-ending swan song on the accordion.

The Painted Bird is at its most magnificent when it lingers on the poetry of its images. The film’s lyrical approach to representing a child’s suffering, through surreal impressions, keeps it from becoming a manipulative and miserabilist tale. And Marhoul achieves this to particularly great effect in a scene where Joska is buried vertically into the ground, his head sticking out of the surface as he’s attacked by crows. You could draw a straight line between this moment and a later one where Joska witnesses Lekh (Lech Dyblik), one of the few good Samaritans who give him shelter, hanging from a ceiling in a mid-suicide attempt. The boy tries to lift Lekh’s body up to save him but finds that he’s too weak to do so. So he quickly jumps on the man’s dangling body, hugging it and pushing it down, as if realizing that a quick death is a more suitable gift to offer a kind stranger than more time in a wretched, unforgiving world.